SPECIAL EDITION: WORLD on the MOVE : A U.S. Perspective : Winding Through the Maze of Immigration Laws : A lawyer helps foreign workers figure it out. New rules go into effect today on who can become a resident.

The middle-aged Los Angeles nurse, a native of the Philippines, sat in Carl Shusterman’s law office two dozen floors above Wilshire Boulevard and told him of her homesickness.

She had been in the United States more than 12 years on a temporary work visa that had lapsed. She was desperate to go home and see her children and grandchildren for Christmas. But she knew that if she left this country she would not be able to come back for years. She’d have to apply for permanent residency, a drawn-out process with a long waiting list, even though her husband was already in the United States, working in Houston.

Now she was asking Shusterman if he could help her. “I just want to go home,” she said.

They pass through Shusterman’s immigration law office every half-hour: the nurses, the computer programmers, the engineers, the models, the in-vitro fertilization technicians--all of them born in other countries, all wanting to stay here, most craving the magical “green card,” which grants permanent work and residency authorization.

They come anonymously, incrementally. And yet, collectively, they change the landscape of America.

With 14 million immigrants, the United States has the largest foreign-born population in the world. The wave of immigration into the United States during the last decade--about 7.3 million legal immigrants plus an estimated 2 million more who came illegally--was the largest since the century’s first decade. Proportionally, it was greater than any decade since the years between 1910 and 1920, when immigration accounted for 40% of the nation’s population growth.

Most immigrants will, at some point, put their lives in the hands of a storefront counselor or a downtown lawyer specializing in immigration, or--in the rarest of cases--an immigration attorney retained by a handful of huge law firms to deal with the occasional needs of their foreign-born clients.

Immigration attorneys like Shusterman guide clients through the maze of U.S. immigration law, which is about to undergo its most drastic revision in 60 years.

The Immigration Act of 1990 goes into effect today, raising quotas of legal immigrants. It also sharply increases the number of immigrants who can qualify for permanent residency by virtue of their professional talents, rather than their relationship to family members who are already here. The new law will make it easier for the South Korean scientist to get a green card, and harder for the Mexican housekeeper.

“You always hear people complain, ‘You’re bringing in these foreigners,’ but that’s not really what happens,” said Shusterman, 42, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service attorney. “They’re already here” and seeking permanent status. “They’re working, or they’re visitors, or students at universities who are getting trained.”

Nurses are Shusterman’s specialty. He heads an American Immigration Lawyers Assn. committee on foreign-educated nurses and handles more than 300 of them a year as clients. The Filipino nurse who sat before him on this afternoon, accompanied by her son, was about to get lucky. “I can get you a green card by February,” the lawyer said calmly.

In response to a national shortage of nurses, Shusterman explained, Congress in 1989 passed a “nursing relief” act, which allowed nurses working on five-year temporary visas to qualify for permanent green-card status, even if their temporary visas had expired.

There was a catch, though. This “amnesty” period would end Oct. 17. They had to apply quickly.

The nurse would not be home for Christmas, but she would be able to go eventually--and, with a green card, to return freely. She was delighted.

“Can you imagine?” she said to Shusterman. “Almost 13 years . . .”

The attorney’s previous client had been a Spaniard studying for his doctorate at UCLA on a student visa. He’d married a classmate early in the year, and they were about to go to Madrid to visit his parents.

It was a lovely idea until someone advised the Spaniard that he couldn’t re-enter the country on his student visa. He’d need to get a green card before they left, and there didn’t appear to be enough time. The couple were worried.

Shusterman called in his paralegal--an Iranian woman raised in India who is fluent in Spanish after living in Barcelona--and asked her to call Madrid that night to make sure the Spaniard could apply for his green card at the U.S. Embassy in Madrid.

He also made sure there was substantial proof, for the INS’ benefit, that the marriage was real: Was there a joint checking account? Were there pictures of the wedding that included other family members? Had the wife changed her name on her driver’s license?

An hour later, a striking young fashion model--a Dutch woman of Sri Lankan and Brazilian extraction--entered for her appointment. Her British-accented poise was tainted by nervousness. She’d recently discovered that the changing U.S. immigration law meant her livelihood was on the line.

“Terrible things are happening to foreign models,” Shusterman confirmed to the woman.

Generally, the new immigration law benefits people who want to live here permanently to work. It nearly triples the annual quota of “skill-based” green cards to 140,000 a year from 54,000. In what Congress intended as a boost to American business competitiveness, 80,000 of those green cards are reserved for immigrants of “extraordinary ability” or who hold advanced academic degrees.

However, the new law also rewrote the categories under which people like models are granted temporary visas. The old category was tightened, limited to “specialty occupations” that require training or preparation.

The INS and Congress were bombarded by complaints from the fashion, arts and entertainment industries, which argued that foreign workers in those sectors would be unfairly squeezed out of the country. In response, Congress last summer began moving on a “technical corrections” bill, which included a section recognizing fashion modeling as a “specialty occupation.” It is expected to take effect later this month.

None of this, though, was of much encouragement to the fashion model who sat before Shusterman on this day. She had to get back to Milan, and she didn’t have time to file for a green card before the old law expired. It looked at that moment as though the new law would cut her out.

“I’ll have to find someone to marry me,” she said with no enthusiasm.