Immigrants Toe the Long Line at INS Office : Bureaucracy: Hundreds queue up at Bellflower facility hours before it opens. Cutbacks force some to wait all day to ask a question.

The morning light is barely a gray tinge in the sky and commuter gridlock is still hours away, but the line from hell is already beginning to form.

About a dozen people stand in the chilly air at 5 a.m., bundled in heavy clothing and toting lots of books and magazines, ready for the three-hour wait in the parking lot before the Bellflower office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service opens.

They are the lucky ones. By the time the office opens at 8 a.m., 200 people will be jostling for position. In another hour, their ranks swell to almost 600, some of whom will end up waiting six hours to talk briefly with a human being.

For thousands of immigrants seeking to renew work papers, replace lost documents or just ask a question, waiting in line has always been a maddening but unavoidable experience that is accepted as part of immigrant life.

But because of recent budget cutbacks in Los Angeles, the line in Bellflower exceeds what even the most jaded queue-maven has come to expect.

By midmorning, hundreds of people are scattered over the parking lot, children slump against the wall of the building and Mario’s lunch truck pumps a steady flow of coffee into the line.

“I need to ask just one question,” moaned Denis Alonso Osorio, a refugee from El Salvador. “Just one question.”

Last month, Osorio waited in line a whole day--only to be told to come back the next day. He returned at 5 a.m. and left six hours later with his work papers still in doubt. He made his third trip to the office last week and was finally successful in getting an answer to his question.

“All this to talk with them for five or 10 minutes,” he said. “I think I should go back to my country.”

INS officials concede that the line at the Bellflower office has reached unreasonable levels and they are trying to correct the situation. But no quick fix is on the horizon, they said.

“We just don’t have the funding,” said Jane Arellano, the INS official in charge of the operation. “Right now, we’re just doing the best we can.”

Arellano said the problem began in February, when the Bellflower office, which now handles up to 750 cases a day, had to eliminate all evening and weekend service.

The Bellflower office is of special importance to Salvadoran immigrants because it is headquarters for a program started last year that granted Salvadoran refugees the opportunity to legally live and work in the United States for a one-year period ending in June.

More than 75,000 people in the INS’ Los Angeles district--covering Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties--applied for the program. At first, the work of registering applicants was spread among dozens of volunteer agencies.

But after the registration deadline passed in October, the bulk of the work--mainly the routine chore of renewing an applicant’s work authorization every six months--was shifted to Bellflower. The office also had started to handle work authorization renewals for a variety of programs in the Los Angeles district.

Arellano said there were no problems at first, but when the office was forced to eliminate evening and weekend service, the lines mushroomed.

Those who can get an appointment through the mail generally wait no longer than 1 1/2 hours.

But for the hundreds of walk-in clients, the cutbacks have been hard to bear. “It’s a matter of resources,” said Don Looney, deputy director of the INS’ Los Angeles district. “Until we get additional resources, there are going to be long lines.”

Consider the case of J.C. Wang, a Taiwanese student who wanted only to ask how he could extend his temporary stay in this country. To his regret, he went to the Bellflower office.

He arrived at 7:50 a.m.--10 minutes before opening. Plenty of time, he thought, to ask his one question.

But five hours later, he was just barely inside the front door. It was another hour before he reached the information booth, where he was promptly told that he was at the wrong office.

“I couldn’t believe it. I spent six hours to get nothing,” he said. “I complained, but, you know, it’s useless.”

Telephoning the office seems an obvious solution, but it has no public telephone number.

Callers can dial a general information line for the INS and listen to a tape-recorded message. Despite the soothing recorded voice on the phone, the experience can put the caller on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The opening message--”For English press 1 now”--is easy. But as the recording plods toward “press 19,” “press 091” and the dreaded, “to repeat the message press 99,” the patience of even the most tenacious caller is tested.

Wang said he tried several INS numbers, but was unable to reach a human being. He finally gave up. “This has not been a very good experience,” he said.

Frayed nerves are only part of the problem. Wang lost a day of work going to the Bellflower office and will have to lose another day to find out how to extend his student visa.

Maria Santana Ramirez, a Salvadoran refugee, had to take her 13-year-old son out of school for a day to make sure that she had someone to translate for her.

For all the difficulties, many people in line are willing to endure the wait, saying the hardship is worth it to be able to stay in this country.

“It’s just life,” said Eduardo Gomez, who left his home in Indio at 4 a.m. to arrive at the office at 7 a.m. “We have no choice.”

Some even see a silver lining to it all.

Wang said in his native Taiwan, the custom of forming a line is rarely followed. Most people choose the traditional method of elbowing their way to the front.

“People in Taiwan don’t know this habit,” he said. “They should learn something like this.”

Besides, he added, no matter how bad the Bellflower line is, the situation is still better than in some countries, such as Russia, where people have to stand in line for hours just to survive, waiting for a chance to buy food and clothing.

“So, I guess it’s OK here,” he sighed at the end of the day. “I’m a reasonable man.”