Legal Immigrants Hurry Up to Wait at INS Office : Social services: Many arrive at L.A. headquarters as early as 1 a.m. to get in line. New policy requires many green card holders to get tamper-proof work permits.

For thousands of Southern California’s legal immigrants, the wait starts in the dark and ends in frustration.

They arrive at the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s downtown Los Angeles headquarters as early as 1 a.m., six hours before opening. Some sleep on the granite sidewalk.

By 5 a.m., the line is several hundred deep, and by 6, the main waiting room doors are opened and numbered tickets are handed out so that the early arrivals will be ensured of getting an interview with an INS agent.

At 6:30--half an hour before any INS agent is at work--all the numbers are gone.

An INS worker with a bullhorn wearily tells the latecomers that they must come back another day, earlier next time. The lucky few hundred who make it inside proceed to lose work time, wages and patience.

Most grumble quietly, shake their heads and do the only thing possible. They sit and wait--for up to three or four hours--to have their immigration papers reviewed.

“It’s frustrating. If I would do business like that, I would be broke in three weeks,” said Helmut Duesner, 53, a German-born Mission Viejo meat cutter who arrived at 6 a.m. Wednesday to comply with a new INS policy requiring him to replace his 1966 work permit, known as a green card.

“I don’t have the words to say what I think (of it),” said Oscar Flores, 19, a Guatemala-born lab technician who arrived about 9 a.m.--too late to get a number to apply for his new green card. “It sucks, man.”

The problem is the increasing volume of new immigrants seeking documentation, INS officials say.

As the INS grapples with what some officials call California’s emergence as “the Ellis Island of the ‘90s,” it also must handle changes in immigration law--such as the 1986 amnesty program for illegal immigrants--that have boosted its workload in the Los Angeles district by 58% since 1990.

Between October, 1991, and September of this year, the INS staff in the district covering Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties handled 530,596 inquiries--the great majority of them in Room 1001, the main information room in the district’s headquarters at 300 N. Los Angeles St.

“The complexity of administering INS is stupendous,” said Robert Moschorak, director of the Los Angeles district. “On a daily basis, we see 2,000 and 2,500 people at this office.”

Since August, officials say, the workload there has ballooned about 33%.

The huge increase was born of a new INS policy meant to clamp down on illegal workers, who can buy counterfeit green cards on Los Angeles street corners for $50, Moschorak said.

The policy change requires an estimated 553,000 legal immigrants in the district who hold green cards issued before 1978 to obtain new, high-tech, tamper-proof cards that will bear their fingerprints, signatures and a magnetic strip that can be read by computer at all ports of entry.

The new green card requirement has spurred a lawsuit against the INS by immigrants rights groups, who claim that the $70 fee is too high and that the requirement violates INS laws. The policy is also clogging Room 1001.

It is there, amid the polyglot buzz of conversation and the numbingly slow advance of customer numbers on flickering red digital display signs, that the INS’ Los Angeles office processes the bulk of paperwork for immigrants from seven counties.

Latino, Asian, European and Canadian nationals waiting for their turn there Wednesday complained that the system is inefficient, inconvenient and confusing.

“I don’t understand why the INS makes it so complicated for people’s lives,” said Alvaro Monroy, 42, a Mexican national. Monroy said he drove from San Bernardino to replace a lost green card, only to be told that he needed new photographs. He returned from the photographer to find all the numbers taken.

“Everyone involved in this process complains. You spend all your workday here,” said Monroy, disgusted with the prospect of losing a second day’s wages.

Alfonso Silva, 46, a green card holder since emigrating from Mexico in 1971, complained about having to spend his workday and $70 getting the new card that all legal immigrants must apply for by Aug. 1, 1993, if they want government permission to work.

“It’s difficult,” said Silva, a printing company foreman from Sun Valley. “I supervise 18, 19 people, and not everybody can do their job (without me being there).”

Why not become a U.S. citizen?

“Because it’s too time-consuming,” Silva said, referring to the average nine-month wait required to get an interview for citizenship. “If they were to tell me this (citizenship) process takes only a couple hours, I’d become a citizen right away.”

Maria Villalobos and Ramon Rios, neighbors in Jalisco, Mexico, before moving to California, said they lined up at 3 a.m. Wednesday to avoid getting turned away as they had on an earlier day when all the numbers were gone by 7 a.m.

“It’s a great inconvenience,” said Villalobos, 44, a sewing machine operator from Lynwood and a legal resident since 1975.

“What’s the use for a new green card when this one’s all right?” asked Rios, 60, a retired Del Monte foreman who emigrated to California in 1954. “Why can’t we do this by mail?”

Mailed-in applications are not acceptable, said Moschorak, the district director.

“If (the fingerprint is) not 100% correct, the card facility . . . in Texas will reject that card,” he said. “The same with the photograph.”

Moschorak and assistant director Christopher Fowler said the INS is trying to streamline Room 1001, especially with the increased workload forced upon it by the new green card requirement.

The agency plans to hire 10 to 17 employees within four months, and it has enlisted more than 25 nonprofit agencies and legal services as remote processing sites for the green card replacement program.

It has assigned employees to rove the waiting room to answer questions. It has changed service at the windows in Room 1001 so that each can handle all types of INS paperwork. And it has installed special windows to accommodate people who are elderly or disabled, those seeking only forms or immigrants who want to correct inaccurate records, Fowler said.

At any given time, 37 INS employees in the district office are at work in Room 1001, helping immigrants navigate the demanding maze of paperwork needed to comply with immigration laws, said Catherine Robinson, the immigration officer who oversees operations in the room.

“The majority of people, I think they understand that we are inundated with a large number of people,” she said. “The INS, I think they understand the number of people we’re processing, but I don’t think they understand it personally. Some of them haven’t been down here to see it.”

INS officials in Washington realize the intense demands placed on Southern California by the recent boom of immigration from Latin America, Asia and other regions, but it cannot provide more funding, Moschorak said.

“A fact of life is that you can only serve X number of people on a daily basis,” he said.

“I would love to be able to serve everybody within an hour. . . . but you can see by the number of people coming into this building that we don’t have the work force,” he said. “To be quite honest with you, it’s not something we’re satisfied with.”

Meanwhile, the wait goes on.

“The only nice part is there’s no fighting,” said Duesner, the German-born meat cutter as he waited for the red digital readout, displaying the number 253, to crawl to his number--399.

“Nobody’s standing there screaming, saying: ‘I’m an American, I want my rights,’ ” said Glenn Szalay, 62, a Canadian doctor who had struck up a conversation with Duesner while waiting.

“But then we’re not Americans,” Szalay added with a cynical grin. “We don’t have any rights!”

And the two men laughed.

BACKGROUND

The Immigration and Naturalization Service headquarters for Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties is at 300 N. Los Angeles St. in downtown Los Angeles. For information on the INS law requiring replacement of all I-151 green cards issued before 1978, call toll free, 1-800-755-0777. For general information on INS requirements and procedures call (213) 894-2119. To order INS application forms, call (213) 625-0320.