Legal Immigrants Find Refuge, Prosperity in L.A. : Newcomers: Sunset Boulevard’s mosaic of cultures testifies to their success. But not all are welcomed.

The birthplace of Los Angeles bears little resemblance to the Mexican village where Esperanza Cabrera was born.

Here, at the bustling Olvera Street marketplace, she waits on tables to the harmonies of strolling musicians and the aroma of deep-fried pastry. There were no such amusements in Cabrera’s Mexico, a poverty-choked farm town near Puerto Vallarta.

Yet she is bound to this place. Her Mexican ancestors were among the founders of present-day Los Angeles, near the start of what today is Sunset Boulevard.

From the historic plaza where the city was born, a cultural mosaic has unfolded across the region during the past 200 years. But perhaps no street better captures the immigrant experience than the one that stretches from the heart of Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean.

Generations of newcomers have claimed Sunset Boulevard as their own.

Today, long stretches of the thoroughfare are dominated by business signs in Spanish, Chinese, Armenian. It is possible to hit breakfast bars and lunch counters along some sections of the 25-mile-long corridor and not hear a word of English.

The boulevard slices through some of the poorest pockets of the city and some of the richest. And all along the way, new chapters are being added to the lore of immigrant America.

Cabrera is among the thousands of legal immigrants drawn to Sunset Boulevard each day, a foreign-born laborer in the tradition of those who have helped forge the city--and the nation--with their muscle, know-how and work ethic.

Like the boulevard itself, she is an American success story.

She slipped into the country at age 11 and started working three years later. Her mother held three jobs. Churches helped feed her brothers and sisters, and thrift stores kept them clothed.

Now she is married and the mother of two. She’s a homeowner and a taxpayer. And she is a legal resident.

“I think some people see me and they think I’m just one more illegal,” said Cabrera, who despite her legal status says she feels the backlash of anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping the state.

“Not all of us ask for money to support our families. We never asked the government for anything,” she said. “People have the right to their opinion, but I have a legal right to be here. This is my home, period.”

An Urban Refuge

Los Angeles is home to tens of thousands of new legal immigrants each year. It is a crazy quilt of cultures from all over the planet, a haven for foreigners fleeing poverty and persecution.

It is the new Ellis Island, an urban refuge for modern-day masses yearning to breathe free.

Some immigrants, such as Cabrera, became legal residents under a 1986 law that has legalized more than 3 million previously undocumented immigrants. Many immigrants win entry to the country because their relatives petition for them to come. Some are imported because they possess special job skills. Still others arrive as political refugees.

Altogether, under a myriad of immigration programs, nearly 1 million immigrants won permanent residency last year nationwide. California took in one-third of them, and nearly 10% of the national total ended up in Los Angeles County.

But as the great American melting pot evolves into a red-hot pressure cooker, the line between legal and illegal immigration is growing more blurred.

A majority of Californians say they believe the state is being overrun and overburdened by waves of newcomers. Some fear that legal immigration could become a casualty in the battle to halt illegal immigration.

Fifty-two percent of Californians say legal immigration should be cut back, according to a September Los Angeles Times poll.

Seventy percent say they have a hard time distinguishing between legal and illegal residents, an indication that all immigrants, regardless of legal status, could face discrimination in the current anti-immigration mood.

Amid an emotional debate that demonstrates the depth of feeling over immigration issues, federal legislators last month delayed previously budgeted benefits to blind and disabled legal immigrants to help finance a plan to extend unemployment payments.

“Even if Congress tomorrow could stop the people who are coming in illegally, we would still have a big problem,” said Dan Stein, executive director of FAIR--the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “There are limits and we are exceeding those. We will not be able to deliver the American dream to all of our children unless we take some kind of breather.”

Boulevard of Dreams

If Los Angeles is the new Ellis Island, then Sunset Boulevard for many newcomers is the passageway to the land of opportunity. There are Mexicans and Central Americans in Echo Park. Armenians and Soviet Jews in Hollywood. There are Europeans and Asians in the upscale communities of Brentwood and Pacific Palisades.

And, of course, Chinese in Chinatown.

Sunset Boulevard cuts just south of the Chinese enclave. From the road, high-rise apartments hide the pagodas and ornamental arches associated with the area.

There are refugees from war-torn Vietnam and Cambodia in this ethnic pocket. But mostly there are Chinese, about 5,000 strong.

Some of the families go back to the first Chinese who arrived in California to work the mines in the Gold Rush years. But most are newcomers with the hopes and problems of immigrants.

Sharon Liu lives in a Sunset Boulevard apartment with her husband, Yao Xun, and their 14-year-old son, Wilson. She is 46. Born in Canton. She came to the United States eight years ago.

Like most foreign-born Chinese, Liu could only gain entry into the country with the sponsorship of a family member.

“The living situation was of a lower standard in China,” Liu said.

Deborah Ching, director of a Chinatown social service center, said many newcomers face language barriers and other obstacles that make life especially difficult.

“Most of these immigrants don’t come with many resources,” Ching said. “In many cases, they’ve given up everything they own to make this move.”

Early each morning, dozens of Chinatown residents flock to Evans Adult School. The campus, at Sunset Boulevard and Figueroa Street, is a magnet for students from across Southern California. For six years, it has helped create new Americans by preparing immigrants for citizenship exams.

Most of the students in Blossom Chen’s early morning class are from Chinatown.

“Everybody stand,” says Chen, a 22-year teaching veteran of Los Angeles’ adult school system. “Feet together. Hands to your heart. Ready, begin.”

Thirty immigrants embark on a wobbly rendition of the Pledge of Allegiance. Some just mouth the words. Most recite it to the end.

Chen then asks the students whether they can read and write English. Whether they support communism. Whether they would back the United States should it ever have a war with China.

This is the end of a long journey for these newcomers. They have waited years for a shot at citizenship. Each has practiced over and over the key phrases that will enable them to become citizens.

“I love freedom,” says 65-year-old Dan Chiem, a former restaurant owner from Taiwan. “I love democracy and I love America.”

Stemming the Flow

If FAIR had its way, immigrants like Chiem would be the first to be locked out.

Chiem entered the country under the family reunification program, a system that gives preferential status to immigrants with family members who are citizens or permanent residents.

More than 500,000 immigrants entered the country last year on that basis, INS records show. According to FAIR, a recent study by the U.S. Census Bureau found that there are 20 million immediate relatives of U.S. citizens and legal residents who are potentially eligible to enter the country with an immigration preference.

FAIR advocates a moratorium on all new immigration, except of refugees fleeing political persecution and spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. The moratorium would give Congress a chance to rethink immigration policy while allowing the INS to erase a backlog of more than 3 million pending applications for permanent residency.

Finding little backing for its moratorium, FAIR has turned its support to a bill introduced by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that seeks to reduce to 300,000 the number of immigrants admitted into the country each year.

“Right now we have a mishmash of rules that don’t have any coherent national objective,” Reid said in an interview. “I’m not trying to cut off immigration to this country, but I think 300,000 a year is about as generous as we can be.”

Immigrant advocates counter that efforts to slow the flow of legal immigration to the country are misguided and racist at their core. They argue that immigrants contribute far more to their communities--in hard work and taxes--than they will ever take in social services.

“It is easy for Dan Stein and people of his ilk to want to close the door,” said attorney Vibiana Andrade, national director for the immigrants’ rights program of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Andrade and others say the mere fact that Reid’s bill could be introduced or supported illustrates the depth of the current anti-immigration mood.

“They are losing their power base, and that frightens them,” Andrade said. “I watch what’s happening with immigration and immigrants, and I see it as being racist and being mostly directed at Latinos and Asians. I just think it’s an extraordinarily shortsighted way of dealing with the world.”

Passage to Opportunity

The world turns hard and graffiti-scarred where Sunset Boulevard slices through Echo Park.

This is a crowded place, where residents gather in doorways and on street corners to pass the news of the day. Old women and young mothers look out onto the boulevard from second-story apartments built on top of aging commercial strips.

Below, people hawk oranges, tamales and gold-colored jewelry along buckling sidewalks.

With a two-wheeled ice cream cart, Xavier Romero joins the army of street vendors on Sunset. He is among the Salvadoran refugees who have been granted temporary protected status, which allows them to live and work in the United States while the government of El Salvador works to establish a lasting peace.

“Life here is day to day,” said Romero, who fled the bloody civil war in his country five years ago. “But it’s not like El Salvador. In my country, there was never the hope of making a better life for my family.”

A few miles up the road, Sunset Boulevard straightens out and breaks toward the Pacific Ocean.

Starting at Vermont Avenue, Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles takes up several city blocks. It, too, is part of the immigrant story.

Starting in the 1970s, Kaiser and other hospitals throughout the United States began importing foreigners in response to a critical shortage of registered nurses. About 60% of the 750 registered nurses on the hospital staff are Asian, and about 90% of those are Filipino.

The nurses were allowed to come on special visas as long as hospitals could prove that they had vacancies that could not be filled by U.S. nurses.

Medi Cereno left the Philippines in 1977, pushed by low wages and an unstable political climate. He worked at a small Chicago hospital for three years before Kaiser recruited him. The hospital eventually helped him become a permanent resident.

Last month, Cereno joined thousands of other immigrants who participated in citizenship ceremonies at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

“I think I appreciate this country more than some people who were born here,” the 40-year-old said. “I thought I was going to come here for a couple of years, save some money and go home. Now I feel that I truly am part of this country.”

Refuge for Persecuted

A few blocks west, business signs announce entry into a community carved by Armenians.

At a strip mall, shoppers browse through the narrow aisles of a neighborhood market featuring coffee, baklava and other delicacies from their homeland. Up the street, Armenian women hunch over sewing machines stitching high-priced fashions.

“You’re in Armenia Town,” John Simitian tells a visitor to his family’s travel agency on Sunset and Kingsley Drive on the eastern edge of Hollywood.

The Simitian family immigrated to the United States in 1976 from what was then the Soviet republic of Armenia. In recent years, the Armenian population in the United States has swelled as refugees have fled a bloody conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Grigor Simitian, 53, is the patriarch of the family. He stands outside the travel agency, pointing out Armenian-owned businesses on the Sunset Strip.

There is an auto body shop, a florist and a dry cleaner, once owned by the Simitians.

“Every people miss his own country,” he said. “But too much people die in my country. No good government. No good rules.”

The Soviet Jews who gather at Hollywood Temple Beth El know all too well what drove their former countrymen to America.

These are men and women, moved by their faith, who fled the former Soviet Union in search of a place to worship freely and excel professionally. About 60 Soviet Jews attend the synagogue, half a block south of Sunset in West Hollywood.

“The Jewish people who live in Russia have many problems,” said Tanya Baytalskya, who left the Ukraine two years ago with her husband and daughter. She was a physicist, her husband, Alex, an engineer.

“It has been this way for centuries,” Baytalskya said of the hardships in her homeland. “From our childhood, we know we are considered less. We know we must be more clever than others.”

Of the 44,000 people who left the former Soviet Union for the United States last year, about one-quarter ended up in California, according to U.S. Census figures. Of those, nearly 65% settled in Los Angeles County. More than 14,000 Soviet Jews live in an area just south of Sunset Boulevard, near Fairfax Avenue.

Leonid Litvachuk, who helps out at Hollywood Temple Beth El, said the synagogue is a focal point for many Soviet immigrants. The temple offers religious and Hebrew instruction, as well as courses in math, English and civics.

For those once forced to worship in secret, there is never a thought of returning to their land or loved ones.

“Here, we can tell openly that we are Jews,” said Litvachuk, a former math teacher who once was beaten by his co-workers because of his beliefs. “Here, we have nothing to hide.”

Blending In

Hidden from view in the canyons above Bel-Air, the Bellagio Road Newcomer School is home to more than 500 recent immigrants from all over the world. More than a dozen languages are spoken.

Opened five years ago half a mile north of Sunset Boulevard, the school offers new arrivals, from fourth grade to eighth grade, a one-year survival course in American culture.

“The purpose is to give newly arrived immigrant students a very highly motivated and successful first year of school in the United States,” Principal Juliette Thompson said. “These kids often feel so different, so out of place. This really is an attempt to save these children and bring them into mainstream America.”

In a sixth-grade classroom on a recent morning, Spanish-speaking students learned how to play the stock market. In a fourth-grade classroom, the rules are written in four languages.

Ten-year-old Sheila Alino arrived in the United States two months ago from the Philippines.

“Over there, you have to pay for school,” said Sheila, who wants to be a teacher when she grows up. “My mom said she wanted to bring me here so I could go to school and learn English.”

West of the San Diego Freeway, the immigrants become harder to identify. But they are here. Austrian-born movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger lives along this stretch. So does Cuban architect Emilio Arechaedera, whose family lost everything when Fidel Castro took over.

Near the end of Sunset Boulevard, just before the pavement meets the ocean, the Modo Mio restaurant stands as testimony to the American dream.

The restaurant’s general manager is from Amsterdam, and there is a waiter from Germany.

Co-owner Rino Brigliadori, an Italian, came to the United States two decades ago on a diplomat’s visa. The other owner, Martine Varlet, left France 10 years ago on a visa offered to foreign investors.

Here, 25 miles from Olvera Street, is a collection of immigrants who, like their ancestors before them, are carving their niche in a foreign land.

“I think immigrants bring a lot to this country,” said Varlet. “We are people who have something in particular to offer. People who can help the country become better.”

About This Series

Today’s article is part of an occasional series, “The Great Divide: Immigration in the 1990s.” As debate about immigration grows more heated, The Times examines the significant issues for California and the nation.

A Boulevard of Hope

The cultural mosaic of Los Angeles is perhaps best symbolized by Sunset Boulevard, from historic Olvera Street Plaza to the Pacific Ocean. Along the 25-mile boulevard are immigrants from around the world who have helped L.A. the nation’s new Ellis Island. Here is a sampling of U.S. Census tracts that illustrate where immigrants have found new homes.

1) FAIRFAX TOTAL POPULATION: 6,550 White: 86.9% Latino: 7.4% Black: 2.8% Asian: 2.2% Native American: 0.7% Includes 1,166 from the former Soviet Union.

OF TOTAL POPULATION . . . 31.8% are foreign-born 13% entered U.S. in 1980s *

2) ARMENIA TOWN TOTAL POPULATION: 8,813 White: 35.2% Latino: 50% Black: 6% Asian: 8% Other races: 0.8% 1,921 people speak “other Indo-European” languages, a census category that includes Armenian.

OF TOTAL POPULATION . . . 72.7% are foreign-born 55.2% entered U.S. in 1980s *

3) ECHO PARK TOTAL POPULATION: 3,989 White: 13.6% Latino: 66.6% Black: 1.1% Asian: 18.7% 2,278 people speak Spanish at home; 251 speak Tagalog

OF TOTAL POPULATION . . . 58.8% are foreign-born 32.9% entered U.S. in 1980s *

4) CHINATOWN TOTAL POPULATION: 5,299 White: 1.9% Latino: 15.1% Black: 1.9% Asian: 81% Other races: 0.1% 3,442 speak Chinese at home, 271 Vietnamese and 138 Mon-Khmer

OF TOTAL POPULATION . . . 81.8% are foreign-born 51.4% entered U.S. in 1980s Source: 1990 Census

Researched by MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times

Making Los Angeles Home

New immigrants to Los Angeles County who received permanent legal resident status in 1992.

LEADING COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN MEXICO: 20,132 EL SALVADOR: 9,401 PHILIPPINES: 7,709 VIETNAM: 6,100 ARMENIA: 5,613 IRAN: 4,263 CHINA: 3,517 KOREA: 3,423 TAIWAN: 3,344 GUATEMALA: 3,214 JAPAN: 2,110 INDIA: 1,566 HONG KONG: 1,345 U.K.: 1,226 LEBANON: 1,060 INDONESIA: 1,014 Note: Does not include people who received legal status from the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act.

Source: California Finance Department

Legal Residency

More than 336,000 immigrants who gained permanent legal resident status in the United States in 1992 lived in California. They either arrived in the United States with visas issued abroad, or adjusted their status to permanent residence. Here are the main categories and the percentage of immigrants legalized under each for California:

IRCA Legislation (29%): More than 98,000 people gained legal permanent residence in 1992 under IRCA--the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Nearly 21,000 qualified for amnesty because they had been in the country since 1982; another 77,000 qualified as special agricultural workers.

Family Sponsorship (34.7%): Nearly 117,000 people became legal U.S. residents through a variety of provisions of immigration laws, with the majority qualifying as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens or spouses and unmarried children of legal permanent residents.

Employment Preferences (9.7%): The Immigration and Naturalization Service accepted 33,000 people in employment categories who were “members of the professions or persons of exceptional ability in the sciences and arts” or were “needed skilled or unskilled workers.”

Refugees and Political Asylum (11.4%): More than 38,000 people received permanent residence based on refugee or asylum status. These can be granted to people who are unable or unwilling to return to their country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution.”

Other Categories (15%): More than 50,000 people received legal status through a variety of immigration provisions, including Soviet and Indochinese refugees who were granted temporary admission in an earlier year, Amerasians and registered nurses admitted in earlier years.

Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service