Central Americans Pose an Immigration Dilemma

While public debate has focused on the thorny question of what to do about the feared influx of Haitian refugees, the Clinton Administration soon will face a similarly vexing dilemma concerning the huge Central American immigrant community, which is concentrated in Southern California.

The situation is particularly pressing for El Salvadorans and Guatemalans, whose numbers have reached about 1 million in the United States, according to most estimates. Many possess only temporary permits to remain and work here; others are illegal immigrants, their numbers bolstered daily by arrivals who quickly acquire counterfeit documents, or micas, hawked clandestinely in newcomers’ barrios.

Most Central Americans are hesitant to return to continued civil strife and dim economic prospects in their homelands. Many have developed deep roots in their adopted country, including U.S.-born offspring who rely exclusively on elders’ accounts for images of their troubled ancestral homelands.

“There’s no future for my children in El Salvador, even if peace does come,” said Marta Elisabeth Ramos, a 27-year-old mother of two infants, both born in California. She expressed a common sentiment among those interviewed recently at the Central American Refugee Center in Los Angeles’ Pico-Union district.

“Now, my children will be able to speak the language and benefit from the opportunities in this country,” added Ramos, a former medical student who said she left her war-ravaged country in 1989 after an anonymous note arrived at her home warning, “You will be the next victim.”

At a time when many say that anti-immigrant backlash is growing nationwide, the status of Central American refugees is one of the myriad complex and contentious immigration questions confronting the new Administration. While Haitians and others desperately seek a place on U. S. shores, Central Americans and others are equally determined not to be kicked out--whatever their legal status.

Other potential immigration time bombs: how to shore up a long-criticized asylum and refugee process ill-equipped to handle the expanding volume of applicants; what to do about ineffective and sometimes discriminatory laws designed to bar the hiring of unauthorized workers; and, perhaps most daunting of all, how to stem the flow of illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border and reduce the attendant violence.

“We can look forward to the Clinton Administration looking at these issues and visiting them anew,” said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a Washington-based group that favors restrictions on new immigration.

It is left to Congress to create immigration laws, but the White House, through its immigration and naturalization commissioner, exerts wide-ranging administrative and policy control, even over a bureaucracy as entrenched--and, critics say, inefficient--as the immigration service.

“The Clinton Administration could have much to say about how immigration laws are enforced, and, indeed, about what the laws should be,” noted Arthur C. Helton, a New York attorney who directs the Refugee Project of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

Clinton’s tacticians are openly seeking alternate approaches to those of Republican predecessors, reaching out to immigrant activists and others long at loggerheads with the system.

“It’s a whole new day,” said Charles Wheeler, directing attorney of the National Immigration Law Center in Los Angeles, one of a number of advocacy organizations that have submitted suggestions to transition planners on a broad range of matters.

Immigrant advocates were irate last month when Clinton abandoned his campaign vow to let new Haitian refugees stay in this country until their asylum claims had been processed. Nonetheless, they express cautious optimism that new attitudes will stress human rights and defuse more than a decade of acrimonious litigation between activists and the immigration service. “I would anticipate a somewhat more humane approach,” said Helton of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

Just as immigrants’ advocates are lobbying for liberalized treatment of Central Americans and other foreign nationals seeking U. S. residency, FAIR and similar organizations favoring limits on new entrants have been pushing hard for their own agenda: bolstered fortifications and controls along the U.S.-Mexico border, interdiction of seaborne refugees, repatriation of many who are now seeking political asylum or who are in immigration-status pipelines.

The restrictionist camp found its hopes buoyed when Clinton changed his position on Haitian immigration.

“It’s rapidly dawning on the American public that there’s an awful lot more people coming here, and they’re going to keep coming here unless we can do something about it,” said FAIR’s Stein.

It remains unclear what policy initiatives the White House will launch. Linda Yanez, an immigration attorney based at Harvard University who headed the immigration transition effort, declined to comment. The naming of an immigration commissioner will undoubtedly have to await the appointment of an attorney general.

But the well-organized Salvadoran lobby has already pressed Clinton aides to expand terms of a current safe-haven policy that has allowed tens of thousands of Salvadorans to remain in the United States and work legally since late 1990. That status expires in June, raising the specter of mass deportations at a time when the peace process in El Salvador is in flux and the ravaged economy is more dependent than ever on exiles who send funds from abroad.

“If Salvadorans were to be massively returned to El Salvador by next July, it would definitely have a catastrophic social, economic and political effect on what already is a very delicate situation,” prominent Salvadoran expatriates noted in a letter sent to transition officials last month.

The warfare and upheaval that engulfed much of the Central American isthmus during the 1980s propelled a vast northward migration--as many as one in five Salvadorans left. The expatriates founded thriving new enclaves from Mexico City to Toronto, Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Although large-scale deportations now seem unlikely, the prospect remains a chilling one.

“People are very preoccupied about what’s going to happen,” said Amilcar Martinez, a Salvadoran who heads a legal-status-extension campaign in Los Angeles, home to the largest Salvadoran exile community, which some estimate at up to 500,000. “Clinton can tell many of us to pack our suitcases tomorrow,” noted Martinez, who, like so many of his compatriots, initially worked as an indocumentado before gaining legal status.

In the meantime, Guatemalan exiles--their plight less prominent than that of their Salvadoran neighbors--see in the new Administration a renewed opportunity to be accorded safe haven in the United States, as Salvadorans were granted in 1990. Guatemalans have been rebuffed in previous efforts to attain protected status, despite the persistence of a murderous 30-year conflict in Guatemala that has stymied United Nations-sponsored peace talks.

In recent weeks, more than 2,000 refugees returned to Guatemala from camps in Mexico, the vanguard of 45,000 planning to repatriate after a decade or more in exile. But many Guatemalans in the United States prefer to stay put.

“Many of us would face death and torture if we went back,” said Denis A. Mencos, a former student activist in Guatemala and now director of a Guatemalan-assistance center in Los Angeles. Mencos said he survived two machine-gun attacks before emigrating more than two years ago.

Advocates of safe haven for Guatemalans in the United States are attempting to enlist Rigoberta Menchu--the Guatemalan Indian and longtime exile who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year--to speak on their behalf during a visit here this spring. Highland Indians, targeted during a 1980s counterinsurgency campaign, make up a growing segment of the Guatemalan expatriate community.

Among those seeking help at a Guatemalan immigrants’ center in Hollywood recently was Silvia Padilla, a 38-year-old mother of three who said she left Guatemala in 1991 with a daughter after receiving telephone calls threatening her and her children unless she quit her job at the University of San Carlos in the capital. University students, teachers and workers also have been frequent casualties during Guatemala’s three decades of conflict, according to human rights groups.

“I’m afraid for my life if I return,” said Padilla, who added that she was threatened even though she was not politically active. “At least here I feel secure.”

Ultimately, though, even if she and other Guatemalans receive safe-haven status, it will only be a temporary reprieve. And, barring some new amnesty initiative or other form of legislative relief, many Central Americans will likely face three choices: go home, go underground as illegal immigrants or apply for political asylum, if they have not already done so.

U.S. refugee law affords the possibility of asylum to foreigners who fear persecution in their home nations based on their national origin, creed or political opinion. Authorities overhauled the cumbersome asylum process last year, but it is still inadequate to handle the growing crush of would-be asylees--now numbering more than 200,000. Processing this load is an besieged staff of 150 asylum officers.

“The system just can’t digest the numbers,” said Duke Austin, immigration service spokesman in Washington. “Our asylum programs are abused. We’re going to have to take a look at something that will accelerate the process.”

And, while acknowledging that last year’s reforms improved asylum prospects, refugee advocates say political considerations continue to work against applicants from U.S.-backed regimes, such as those in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Republican officials have maintained that the bulk of Central American exiles are, like Haitians, economic refugees and therefore not entitled to asylum. By contrast, Nicaraguans fleeing the former Sandinista regime had success winning asylum, as did applicants from former Communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

“There continues to be a blatant disparity and politicization of the political asylum process,” said Carlos Holguin, general counsel for the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.

On the other side of the issue, critics contend that Central Americans and others who are economic rather than political refugees have exploited the torpid asylum application bureaucracy to gain work permits and footholds for future residency claims.

“El Salvadorans should go home and rebuild their country now,” said Stein of FAIR, citing last year’s peace accords. “They want to transform the policy into a form of permanent immigration.”

But exiles point out that peace in El Salvador is still tenuous. Morever, they say fairness and humanitarian concerns dictate that Salvadorans who have made a new life in the United States should be allowed to remain permanently.