Californians Gauge Effect of Immigration Reform

For Southern California immigrant advocates, President Clinton’s sweeping immigration reform proposals are disappointing measures that will cut back on immigrants’ rights but are unlikely to have much impact on the continuing illicit flow of humanity.

“I don’t know that I would have called President Clinton a friend of immigrants, but I certainly would have expected more from a Democratic President,” said Vibiana Andrade, national immigrants’ rights director for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “He’s taking a law-enforcement approach to a very complicated issue.”

But for those seeking restrictions on immigration, the President’s wide-ranging program drew praise as a long-overdue crackdown.

In Orange County, where a recent grand jury report called for a three-year moratorium on legal and illegal immigration, a former grand jury official said “it sounds like Clinton is at least trying to do something.”

“It’s encouraging,” said Tom Dalton, the grand jury member who helped prepare last month’s controversial report. Local immigrant rights activists have denounced the study, which blamed the influx of illegal immigrants for a range of societal ills. But Dalton said “there are a lot of people who feel the same way we do.”

Others applauding the President’s action included Ben Seeley, Southern California program director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to reduce new arrivals.

“We’re very happy that the President is moving in that direction,” Seeley said. “After five years of gloom and doom, we’re starting to see a lot of things happen.”

Nowhere does the issue of illegal immigration resonate with more force than in California, which, according to many estimates, absorbs as many as half of all immigrants--legal and illegal--entering the United States.

One of the White House’s key reforms targets the beleaguered system for granting political asylum for those fleeing persecution abroad. The President would create a system of “expedited” repatriation of immigrants whose asylum applications are deemed groundless upon their arrival.

However, many critics fear that overzealous immigration officers could send legitimate refugees back to repressive regimes, possibly endangering their lives without the due process protections.

Amin David, director of a Latino business association based in Orange County, said the proposal shows that “President Clinton is beginning to bend to the pressure.”

“It is beyond me why, in a country as strong and powerful as this one, we cannot address the real issue and that issue is hunger,” David said. “It really does not matter how many guards you send to the border.”

Others maintain that revisions of the asylum procedures were long overdue, since many economic migrants have taken advantage of lengthy appeals to prolong their stays in the United States.

U.S. immigration officials say asylum claimants arriving at Los Angeles International Airport have been reduced dramatically since the fall of 1991, when authorities began incarcerating almost all airport asylum applicants.

But California leads the nation in the number of so-called “affirmative” asylum applications: those filed by immigrants who are already residing in the United States. A huge backlog of 300,000 cases is pending before U.S. immigration authorities, half of them involving Central Americans, mostly residents of Southern California.