COLUMN ONE : Packing Up and Going Back Home : With stubbornly high unemployment, more immigrants are returning to their homelands. ‘Many of them no longer believe in the American dream,’ says one observer.

Orlando Canas lifts a trouser leg over his calf and reveals a mottled, scarred section of flesh the size of a quarter, a bullet wound that is a lingering reminder of El Salvador’s brutal civil war.

Canas left El Salvador because of the war, but he soon became disillusioned with the violence in Los Angeles. For a week during the riots, Canas carried a shotgun and patrolled the roof of the trucking company where he worked. Two months later, he was making a delivery south of downtown when a man put a pistol to Canas’ temple and hijacked his truck. Several gangs are warring in his Echo Park neighborhood, so he is afraid to let his two young children play outside.

Canas now views Los Angeles as more a menace than a refuge. So on this Saturday morning, he and his wife are scurrying around their ramshackle apartment--filled with cardboard boxes, suitcases and overflowing baskets--as they rush to finish packing. The next day, Canas would take his wife and children to the airport so the family can return to El Salvador.

For many immigrants, America remains the land of opportunity, and more people still enter than leave. With stubbornly high unemployment, however, an increasing number are going back home, mirroring a trend recorded during the Great Depression. In Southern California, with its enormous immigrant population and persistent economic problems, the reverse migration is even more pronounced.

Immigrants who return home are nothing new. In a typical year, more than 100,000 legal immigrants move back to their home countries, government analysts estimate. For decades, Mexican workers have left the United States during recessions and come back during boom times.

What is unusual now is that so many immigrants from a wide range of countries are leaving the United States.

“The earlier immigrants were absolutely certain that if they worked hard, they could make it and prosper . . . but immigrants today are really questioning that,” said Edward Chang, assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside. “Many of them no longer believe in the American dream.”

A number of foreign embassies have recorded a sharp rise in former residents registering to move back. Improving conditions at home, embassy officials say, have helped persuade many to return. At the same time, a number of Asian countries aggressively recruit former residents who hold advanced degrees.

El Salvador and Guatemala, where there is now a tenuous peace, and Taiwan, Singapore and Korea, which have expanding economies and rising wages, are among the countries that reported a marked increase in former residents registering to return. So many former Los Angeles residents are back in Seoul that they have formed a club that meets monthly to discuss readjusting to life in Korea. Even countries such as the Philippines, with marginal economic growth last year, report an increase in returning citizens.

The trend also is reflected in enrollment figures at the Los Angeles Unified School District, where, after three years of large enrollment increases, officials reported that 12,000 fewer students than projected registered this year. More students are leaving the district during the school year than at any time in history. Some of the students have just moved out of the city or the state, school district officials say, but others have left the country.

Some welcome this increase in emigration and argue that it will simply mean more jobs for American-born workers. Others contend that immigrants have enabled American businesses to thrive because of low labor costs. And they warn that the loss of highly educated immigrants to Asian companies will enable other countries to close the technology gap.

Orlando Canas and his family seem far removed from such policy debates. Canas left El Salvador in the early 1980s during the civil war and moved to Los Angeles because of the economic opportunity. But his wife has been unable to land a steady job for two years, and he has been expecting a layoff for months. He plans to buy an old school bus and start a modest transportation company in El Salvador.

“I could never afford to own my own business here,” Canas said as he packed dishes in the kitchen with his wife. “It will be a struggle financially in El Salvador, but it’s a struggle in L.A. So I might as well live in a place where I can have my own business and raise my kids away from drugs and gangs and drive-by shootings.”

In the past, no matter how much they struggled in the United States, most Salvadorans would not return home because of the civil war, said Carlos Vaquerano, spokesman for the Central American Refugee Center in Los Angeles. But now, with the fragile peace, he said, families consider the option of moving back.

“I’ve already gone to a number of going-away parties for friends,” he said. “I had one friend from El Salvador who had been unemployed for a long time and had no prospects of finding a job. He was so broke he couldn’t afford a ticket home.

“So he went to the U.S. immigration office downtown and said: ‘I’m undocumented. I want to go back home. Please deport me.’ ”

*

At a Filipino restaurant near downtown, three immigrants sit at a corner table. They order plates of mechado, a spicy beef stew, and talk about how they have fared in America.

Maximino Clamor has been unemployed for eight months. Cesar Roque has been laid off twice recently. Joe Navidad has $7,800 in bills.

Navidad shakes his head and mutters: “The American dream.”

“A dream is all it is,” Clamor says.

“No, it’s a fantasy,” Roque says.

“For all of us,” Navidad says, “it’s been a nightmare.”

The three men, who share a small apartment, attended a Christmas party last December, along with dozens of other Filipino immigrants, and the main topic of conversation was: “When are you returning home?” Clamor, Roque and Navidad all plan to move back by the end of the year.

Philippine consulate officials estimate that the number of Filipinos in the United States who have registered for return visas in the past two years has increased by about 35%. Most, like Navidad, were unable to find well-paying jobs here.

In the Philippines, Navidad graduated from college and became a community activist. But his older brother, who had moved to the United States in the 1950s, persuaded him to immigrate. The brother, who worked for an electronics company, prospered here and bought a four-bedroom house a block from the ocean in Huntington Beach.

“My older brother always sent me pictures of his house. And I’ll never forget what he used to write: ‘If you want a better life, come to America right away.’ ” Navidad smiles and shakes his head. “I just laugh at that now.”

After a few years working in a warehouse and selling garage-sale items at weekend swap meets, Navidad, 44, now makes $18,000 a year working for a Filipino social service agency. When he moved to Southern California, his goal was to buy a house. Instead, Navidad, his son and his roommates live in a run-down apartment in a Filipino neighborhood about 50 feet from the roar of U.S. 101. The carpet is threadbare, most of the ancient furniture has been donated by friends, and the roommates sleep on mattresses without bedsprings or sleeping bags.

“I’m very bitter,” Navidad says, staring out his bedroom window at the stream of cars speeding by. “I’m not mad at the U.S. I don’t blame anybody. I am just so disappointed. . . . I didn’t expect it to end up like this.”

*

Illsun Chung’s suitcases are packed and lined up in the hallway of his father’s Santa Ana apartment. In three hours, his father will drive Chung, his wife and two children to the airport for their return to South Korea.

Chung’s parents immigrated to the United States in 1977 “in search of opportunity,” he said. But during the recession, Chung saw large American firms lay off designers and cut budgets, while in Korea, he said, many firms were expanding and capitalizing on business opportunities with neighboring Asian countries. As a result, Chung accepted a position as vice president of Korea’s largest graphic design firm.

“I’m going where the opportunity is,” he said. “The business atmosphere in Korea now is like the U.S. . . . used to be.”

In the past, many Asian professionals, particularly engineers and scientists, chose not to return home because their countries lagged so far behind the United States, said Stewart Kwoh, director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles. But during the past decade, he said, Asian countries have made tremendous technological advances and their economies are growing rapidly.

After all the Southern California layoffs in defense and aerospace, Kwoh said, many Asian professionals are eager to work in Asia. Others, he said, frustrated “by the glass ceiling many Asians face, decide they will feel more comfortable back home.”

The number of South Koreans who have registered to return home has increased dramatically over the last decade, according to embassy statistics. In 1981, about 900 moved back; in 1991, more than 5,500 overseas Koreans--the vast majority from the United States--registered to return.

During the past decade, about 5,000 Taiwanese students a year have studied in the United States. But in 1981, only about 600 took jobs back home. A decade later, more than 3,000 moved back.

The American school system once was a lure, but today, many immigrant families “are shocked” by the deteriorating conditions in the public schools and believe that their children can get a better education back home, said Ailee Moon, professor of social welfare at UCLA.

“Five years ago, it was unheard of for a Korean immigrant to return home,” she said. “But immigrants today become very disillusioned when they sacrifice so much to come here . . . then realize they’re not doing any better than their friends and family back home.”

Pyong Yong Min, a columnist for the Korea Times, a newspaper based in Los Angeles, recently visited Korea and wrote an article about all the former Los Angeles residents he met. About 50 of them now meet monthly in Seoul, and a group of diplomats once based here have formed “The Wilshire Club” to reminisce about life in Los Angeles.

“The 1990s have been especially popular for the migration homeward,” Min wrote in his Korean-language column. “The riots seem to have made it more popular.”

In the coming years, Min expects emigration back to Korea to increase. For many who left white-collar jobs in Korea to operate businesses in high-crime inner cities where they feel great racial tension, the riots might have been the final fillip.

*

Rosenda Morales is from Guatemala; her husband, Jean Elsarboukh, is from Lebanon. Both grew dissatisfied with life in Los Angeles, where they met, and decided to return home. But whose home?

They agreed on Guatemala because of the strife in Lebanon and because Morales’ father promised to lend them money to open a restaurant. They plan to move by Christmas.

When they moved to California in the mid-1980s, both thought that they soon would be sending money back to their families. But after they had their second child, Elsarboukh had to ask for help from his brother to pay the bills. And when they needed a car, it was Morales’ father who sent them the money to pay for it.

Still, they struggled to build a life here. The apartment they rent in Glassell Park is immaculate. Elsarboukh laid new tile in the breakfast room, built a counter in the kitchen, and stained and shellacked the wood ceiling. He has built a wooden arbor in the back yard and a brick border around the roses and grass he planted.

Elsarboukh, who makes about $5 an hour driving a delivery truck for a food supply company, recently paid $1,800 and enrolled in a course where he was trained and certified to drive big-rig trucks. He has filled out 600 applications in the last seven months but has not had a single job offer.

Now they simply cannot afford to live in Los Angeles. At least in Guatemala rent is cheap and they have an extended family so they do not have to pay child care.

“When I went back to Guatemala to visit, I saw that my cousin and his family were living better than us,” said Morales, who cleans houses. “They have a house, a car, money in the bank. We’re struggling just to pay our rent.”

*

After years of living in America, not all emigrants are able to adjust.

Taehee Lee left Los Angeles for South Korea in 1991 because the recession had cut the business at his architecture firm by half, and he was pessimistic about the building industry in Southern California. But Lee, who attended the UCLA School of Architecture, had difficulty adjusting to the ritualistic traditions of Korean business. Even though born and raised in Korea, he was viewed as an outsider at the large architecture firm in Seoul where he worked.

His wife, Myung, who had been an executive at a large Korean family service center in Los Angeles, discovered that back in Korea, “being a woman in a management position wasn’t accepted.”

And although Myung Lee had complained in the past about the American education system, she was dismayed to see her children spending much of their time in school on rote exercises and memorizing. She began to appreciate the American school system’s emphasis on creativity and innovation.

Many immigrants who complain about Los Angeles idealize life at home, the Lees said. They do not realize how difficult it is to readjust after years of living in the United States.

“In America, if you want to do business with someone, you just call them up on the phone; in Korea, you have to develop a personal relationship first . . . do a lot of wining and dining,” said Taehee Lee. “I was more used to the bottom-line mentality of American business, where the environment was more creative and it was easier for me to express my ideas.”

After a year in Seoul, he decided that he would be more comfortable working as an architect in the United States. So last year, he and his family moved back to Los Angeles.