COLUMN ONE : Together in the Shadows of the Law : The link between parents and nannies who are illegal immigrants creates an uneasy and delicate balance of power, love, need and suspicion.

Like nearly every first-time mother returning to work, Joan wanted a live-in. Knowing her business depended on reliable child care, she wanted someone flexible. Aware of studies showing that children’s development depends on consistency in care-giving, she also wanted a nurturer who would stay for years.

Her first experience--an older woman who had cared for the children of celebrities--taught her that American nannies can be haughty. “They’re not Julie Andrews,” she said. Joan, who did not want her name or those of her employees used, also shied away from young European women because friends had told her they were more interested in boyfriends than babies. “ Au pair (means) young alcoholic.”

Eventually, Joan settled on illegal immigrants from Mexico. “You do have more of a hold over an illegal,” she admitted uneasily, knowing it sounds exploitative. “They have no option. They have to make good at it, or their kids will go hungry.”

Joan is one of a new generation of working parents who never dreamed of employing domestics and are learning how exhausting, frustrating and ethically complex it can be to hire strangers to live with them and care for their children.

They include single mothers and dual-income parents, as well as the wealthiest of professionals such as Zoe Baird, who was forced to withdraw her nomination for U.S. attorney general amid controversy over her hiring of two illegal immigrants. Experts say it is a bi-coastal phenomenon, a relatively costly arrangement that often links well-paid professionals with perhaps 1 million immigrants nationwide, creating an uneasy and delicate balance of power, love, need and suspicion played out in privacy and the shadows of the law.

For some parents, the hardest part is trying to figure out who to be: employer, family member or friend. In some cases, the parents become intimately involved in their employees’ lives, helping them obtain birth control, attending teacher conferences for their children, mediating the problems of uninsured drivers, playing host to their relatives, and, when the immigrants want it, paying up to $3,000 for an immigration lawyer to get them a green card.

In other cases, parents are guilty of thoughtlessness or outright abuse in their roles as employers. Anne Kamsvaag, workers’ rights project coordinator for the Coalition for Humane Immigrants Rights of Los Angeles, said that many parents--even in wealthy neighborhoods--refuse to pay more than paltry wages, often well below the minimum wage.

“There is this attitude that I’m doing this person a favor by giving her a job,” she said. “What favor are you doing by making a person work all day for next to nothing?”

Yet many parents, Kamsvaag said, don’t believe that “these (kinds) of people” and “this kind of work” deserve better pay. “This is an employer-employee relationship, and responsibilities go with that.”

Barbara, a Los Angeles doctor, first hired a woman from El Salvador as a housekeeper when she knocked at the door and asked for work. When the doctor had a child, she hired the woman’s friend, another Salvadoran, as a nanny.

A Corn Belt native, the doctor said she had never thought of herself as a person who would have servants. “To me, it’s sinful to have somebody do your work. But this is the world we live in,” she said.

“We don’t have any extended family. We don’t have relatives we could leave (the child) with even for a few hours,” said Barbara, who also asked that her real name not be used. “They all are at least an hour or two away. Even then, grandparents don’t always want to take care of kids.”

In addition, “it meant a lot to her to have the job.” The nanny is a widow who sends her salary back home for her three children. “She’s able to send her kids to school and hope for a future for them.”

Identifying with the nanny’s struggles as a mother, and considering her family and friend, Barbara helped her obtain the protected legal status allowed Salvadorans and applied for full legalization. Neither she nor the nanny could afford lawyers’ fees, so she attempted to navigate her own way through the labyrinth of government agencies.

What she found out was “this is one of those things where different branches of government do different things.”

As a result of not filing a certain form, she wound up with a $1,200 fine. She has hired a lawyer to appeal the fine. But despite an anticipated wait of up to 10 years, she believes it will be worth it.

“If she gets a green card, she can stay and work legally and can bring her children. This is what a mother in her situation has to do. This is her way of giving love to her kids.

“When I think of all the love she gives to my daughter,” she said, starting to weep, “it just makes me cry.”

Parents are employers, but the relationship is close and personal. “Your kids are bonding with this person,” said Carl Shusterman, a Los Angeles lawyer on the board of governors of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. in Washington. Ironically, involved employers have made domestic workers the most likely of all immigrants to seek legalization, but they are also the least likely to get it. Some workers have been deported once immigration officials become aware of their existence. “There are hundreds of thousands of illegal people working out here, but the reason the government has picked on housekeepers is because the employer has tried to make these people legal,” Shusterman said.

But even if authorities may focus on nannies in enforcing immigration law, they do little to protect nannies from workplace abuses. California labor regulations, in fact, exempt baby-sitters from minimum wage and overtime pay laws, although baby-sitters who spend a “significant” amount of time as housekeepers are supposed to be covered.

Nance Steffen, a regional manager with the state labor commissioner’s office, conceded the potential for abuse but said that “part of the problem is because they (nannies) are not covered, we don’t hear about it.”

Still, immigrant rights advocates say miserable workplace conditions are rampant. Yet few domestics--even those working legally in this country--come forward to press claims against employers, largely because of the difficult obstacles they would face in court. “When you’re working and living in someone’s house, who’s going to testify in your behalf?” asked Sarah Cohen, an employment lawyer with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

Immigration and the recession have combined to cause the number of applicants for domestic jobs to skyrocket over the past five years. Some parents say it’s hard to find someone with whom they are comfortable. Producer Janet Faust, a Pacific Palisades mother of four, said her current ad for a child-care job paying $350 a week elicited 200 calls, some from homeless mothers, as well as out-of-work teachers, accountants and even two ski instructors. About half did not speak English. “Probably 40 were people you’d want to work with,” she said.

“We interviewed dozens,” said one Los Angeles lawyer. “We were sorry they ended up knowing our address.”

One domestic agency director in Los Angeles estimated that 90% of employers knowingly hire illegal immigrants, partly because they are cheaper. But most parents say they hire illegals because they are willing to do the work--and U.S. citizens are not.

When Joan placed an ad in an Orange County shopper about four years ago, she tapped into what she called a “free-floating society of single Latinas that have children and family somewhere else.” They are willing, she said, to do chores that used to be associated with mothers: laundry, cooking, picking up, doing a sink full of dishes.

Her first Mexican live-in, Julia, was so nurturing and demonstrative that after a year the child preferred the nanny’s company, said Joan, who travels in her work. “It hurt, but I understood it.”

Joan learned Spanish but worried there might be misunderstandings about where to reach her in emergencies. She worried about the nanny’s allegiance. “If her kid got sick, would she drop mine (and return to Mexico)?”

One night, when Joan and her husband were on a weekend trip, Joan called home about 8 o’clock. “They weren’t home. I was in Nevada. It was the nightmare of my life.” As it turned out, the child had spent the night with Julia at Julia’s friend’s house. “At that point, I realized Julia was a person who wanted my child to be part of her world and (the child) could not be part of her world and not give me heartburn. I had to know where my kid was at all times.”

Then, after three years of almost daily contact, Julia disappeared for 10 days. Joan’s child was about to enter school and she had made a proposal to Julia to change her hours. “I probably at that point insulted her,” Joan said. “Or I created a situation where she couldn’t bear to confront me with her real feelings.”

Joan finally dismissed Julia, fabricating a story for her child who loved the nanny and spoke Spanish with her. Now the child, 6, refuses to speak Spanish with Julia’s replacement. Said Joan: “She complains to me endlessly, ‘I can’t talk to her, Mom.’ ”

Joan said she has “terrific mixed emotions” about the arrangement. In addition to worries over safety and ethics, she fears that her child and others in the Southland are growing up intimately with Latinas but learning to see them as servants, “peripheral to society, shadowy characters.”

“It’s the whole mentality of ‘Gone With the Wind,’ ” she said. “The distance created is more profound when they are physically close, but mentally separate.”

*

Late afternoon in a dim anteroom in a Santa Ana employment agency, a half-dozen Latinas sit on folding chairs waiting to be interviewed for domestic work.

They know their prospects are varied--they could be hired by a couple who will give them their own apartment, a good salary, maybe take them to Europe or Hawaii on family vacations. On the other hand, they could be deadbeats, refusing to pay, or slave drivers, making them work unpredictable 12- to 15-hour days, even after the parents come home from work.

They hear stories such as one about a domestic worker who wasn’t allowed the day off because her employers didn’t want the dog to get lonely. Some say they have been physically or sexually abused.

Some are puzzled when employers present them with phone bills or expect them to learn new ways of child care. Arlyce Currie, program director for a child-care resource and referral agency in Oakland, said, “They say, ‘People in my country hold the baby all the time. This mother is telling me she wants the baby to crawl around and explore.’ ”

Experts say the extreme demand for infant care would make it a sellers’ market, but the availability of immigrants who are vulnerable to deportation shifts power to the buyers. Without English or legal papers, the domestics earn as little as $65 a week in San Diego; with English and papers as much as $500 in Los Angeles.

Experts estimate that employee turnover is as high as 50% annually, mostly in those homes with the lowest salaries. In a recession, domestic jobs can vanish simultaneously with the employers’ jobs.

Mercedes, a 27-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, has worked in four different Southern California homes in the past eight years. For her, it has been a matter of trade-offs.

On the one hand, there is the money, up to $175 a week, much more than she could earn at home. She likes the “rhythm of life” here, so much that she says she will never return. She has her friends and her church group.

But there is much that she has seen and experienced that she resents: opened-ended job requirements and what she calls employers’ lack of consideration.

Once, she said, she was thrown out of a Malibu home at 5 a.m. for refusing to get up to see to a crying infant, a duty she never agreed to or was being paid for. She watched the owners of a Long Beach home let dogs into the kitchen she had just cleaned, feeding them food scraps on the floor.

She said she missed countless outings with her friends during off hours when her Huntington Beach employers called at the last moment to say they were running late and asked if she could stay over an hour or so even though Mercedes had worked her full 12-hour day. She quit after the couple made her pay for a broken plate.

Now she has been without work for two months. She said she needs to keep working to support her two orphaned younger brothers in Mexico. Even without these obligations, she would stay. “Here I got my first job, my first salary. I can buy things you can’t get in Mexico,” she said. “I have a lot of friends here.”

Also having a tough time finding work is Norelia Pereira, a 25-year old Tijuana native with a work permit. She has been looking for a job for two months to no avail and she blames tough economic times.

Pereira, an Orange County resident for three years, lost her job with a Fullerton divorcee and her three children after the woman was laid off at an electronics firm.

“I liked the work. I had my own room. She paid me on time. I could go out and the kids were well-behaved,” Pereira said. “It went well with her, but her company closed and she had no money to pay me.”

Her job search is complicated by there being “too many workers for what is needed.”

“I have filled out 10 applications, but they don’t call me,” said Pereira, who is living with family members in Fullerton. Pereira is seeking the minimum wage, or $180 a week.

Others say they will have to return to their native countries if they cannot find work, even though their family members have migrated here to join them.

*

The spotlight thrown on domestic child-care workers by the Zoe Baird case illuminates the “extent of the child-care crisis in this country,” said Barbara Reisman, executive director of the Child Care Action Campaign, a New York-based research and advocacy organization. Relationships between parents and domestic workers could be eased greatly by simplifying regulations for immigrants and domestic workers and upgrading the prevailing notion of child care as “unskilled labor,” advocates say. The Baird case “underscores the need for a realistic family policy including expanded, improved child care, flexible work hours and more family leave,” Reisman said.

Advocates dream of paid, 18-month leaves, laws to allow parents to check on applicants’ backgrounds, and professional child-care training for domestic workers. But they are unsure who will make that a national priority.

Meanwhile, Currie said: “You rely on your instincts, as always, and references. It’s a lonely situation.”

Times staff writers Stuart Silverstein and S. J. Diamond contributed to this story.