Illegal Residents Not Just From Nearby Nations

Along the California-Mexico border, the daily arrests include the usual hundreds of illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries, but also something of a surprise: a few Armenians, an Irishman and a native of the Sudan.

In San Francisco, a group of Poles enters the country with forged Swedish passports. Immigration officers notice something wrong when they try to interview the “Swedish” tourists. They do not speak Swedish.

Illegal immigrants come from all over the world. They come in rickety boats. They arrive on jetliners with valid business, student or tourist visas and then ignore the expiration date and stay here illegally. They enter on forged documents or fraudulent employment visas. They contract sham marriages to U.S. citizens.

In California, the image of illegal immigrants coming across the U.S.-Mexican border dominates the immigration debate. But it is not the full picture. In reality, one-third of the nation’s estimated 3 million illegal immigrants came from neither Mexico nor elsewhere in Latin America.

And nearly half of those illegal immigrants who stay permanently in the country arrive here with temporary visas rather than crossing the border illicitly.

“This problem (of illegal immigration) is partially a Mexican problem but it is also a problem of all parts of the world,” Doris M. Meissner, the new commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said in an interview this week.

“The Mexican border is the most visible, the most commonly understood, but it is not the only thing there is,” Meissner said. “You have to think of the border as . . . all of the airports that bring people into the country.”

Although efforts are being made to restrict illegal entry via the porous southern border, Meissner said, other steps also must be taken. She said more effective databanks must be set up in embassies overseas to deny visas to those “deported two years before.”

*

Illegal immigration from Mexico accounts for about 30% of the nation’s estimated total. INS figures show that Caribbean and Central and South American nations account for another 37%. The remainder--one-third the U.S. total--are from throughout the globe.

Mexican nationals account for 1 million of the nation’s illegal immigrants. El Salvador and Guatemala follow with about 300,000 and 120,000 respectively. Next are three nations less known for contributing to the illegal immigrant pool: 100,000 each from Canada, Poland and the Philippines.

California is home not only to 600,000 illegal immigrants from Mexico but also 68,000 illegal immigrants from the Philippines, 26,000 from Canada, 19,000 from Iran and 13,000 from Italy.

Southern California attracts all types of immigration violators--”everything you can think of,” said Mike Flynn, INS chief of enforcement for the western region.

Illegal immigrants who enter on forged documents or overstay their visas often “do more harm to our country” than those crossing the border, Flynn said. “They are more sophisticated and more likely to take those good jobs that U.S. citizens would want because they have skills.”

An estimated 150,000 illegal immigrants who settle in this country every year are foreigners who arrive legally and stay beyond the expiration date of their visas--nearly as many as those who slip across the border and stay permanently, according to the INS. Nothing dramatized this as well as the arrest in the World Trade Center bombing of a Jordanian who overstayed his visa by four years.

Officials say it is very difficult to track down foreigners who overstay their visas. Others say it is not worth the economic or social costs.

“You have to balance it against whether you are going to become a totalitarian society,” said Jerry Tinker, staff director of the U.S. Senate subcommittee on immigration and refugee affairs. “The Russians knew very well in the Cold War days who came and went. We don’t have the desire to have a police state at our airports and borders.”

“It is a balancing act,” said an official in the U.S. State Department, which issued 5 1/2 million visas last year. “We’re trying to encourage people to come here but at the same time be vigilant against the people trying to circumvent immigrant laws.”

*

Travelers from 22 nations, mostly European, are allowed into the United States on passports without having to secure a visitor’s visa beforehand from an American embassy. They are supposed to leave within 90 days.

Most foreign visitors must apply for visas, at a U.S. embassy or consulate in their own country. Because the State Department lacks the resources to investigate the background of all but the most suspect visa applicants, visa officers must rely on a cursory scan of letters from employers and other documents in assessing the odds that a person will return when the visa expires. But bogus documents have increasingly become a problem, officials report.

“You have places where one officer will interview several hundred people in a day,” said a State Department official.

With only 1,500 agents nationwide--one-fifth the strength of the Los Angeles Police Department--INS officials say that it is difficult to track down the large numbers of foreigners who overstay their visas.

“It’s very hard to police,” said Vern Jervis, the INS spokesman in Washington.

Mexico has more “visa overstays” than any other country--an estimated 60,000 in 1992, according to the INS. That was only 4% of the total issued to Mexican nationals. The percentage of overstays was higher in a number of other countries, such as Canada, where an estimated 16,000, or 16%, of the total overstayed their visas.

INS enforcement chief Flynn said the INS goes after overstays by enforcing the prohibition against hiring illegal immigrants. “The basis for the Immigration Reform and Control Act was if we could stop employment as the magnet, we could stop them from wanting to overstay,” Flynn said.

However, many experts say that without tamper-proof work authorization documents and more aggressive enforcement, the law is not meeting its intent.

Harold Ezell, former INS western regional commissioner, favors installing a computerized system to track foreign visitors--a system that was recommended in 1981 by the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy.

But he concedes that such a system would only keep track of whether foreigners have overstayed their visas, not help in finding them. Instead, Ezell proposes discouraging foreigners who overstay their visas the same way that he proposes to curb illegal immigration across the border: cutting off public benefits, such as free emergency health care and public education, to illegal immigrants and their children.

Unlike illegal immigrants from Mexico, who can often make the border dash after a bus ride up from the interior, entry by people from abroad can involve intricate schemes. Consider these cases from the INS files:

* In New York, immigration officers arrested a Haitian immigrant who had been arranging sham marriages for $2,000 each between U.S. citizens and foreigners who had never met. Foreign spouses of U.S. citizens are given preference to immigrate under U.S. laws. The INS was alerted to the scheme by a court clerk who grew suspicious when a citizen applied for a second blood test for a marriage license in the same week. The marriage arranger is in prison. The citizen was granted immunity in return for her testimony, but could have been sentenced to up to 10 years in federal prison for her role in the fraud.

* In Los Angeles, a Taiwanese national entered the country legally on a student visa, which expired as soon as he graduated from law school. He wanted to stay, and his wife was still in Taiwan, so he created a job for her on paper. He told immigration authorities he needed a secretary who was fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

She was authorized to enter the United States under a provision in the immigration law that gives preference to workers with special skills. Once here, she petitioned to legally bring in her husband--who, of course, was already here but staying illegally on an expired student visa.

* In San Francisco this year, a freighter made it all the way to a pier near the Golden Gate Bridge, dropping off 250 illegal immigrants from China. Seven ships carrying a total of about 1,200 Chinese have been discovered since early last year off the California coast--including one carrying 84 men who had survived 50 days in the vessel’s fetid hold.

Many of the Chinese men and women who illegally entered the country said they agreed to pay up to $30,000 to smugglers, consigning themselves to years of working off the debt.

*

Without visas that would allow them to fly into the United States directly, some Chinese immigrants land in boats off the coast of Mexico or fly into Mexico City, then follow the route traditionally used by illegal immigrants from Latin America across the border.

Yuen, a 19-year-old Chinese, arrived in Los Angeles in late June, debilitated by pain from a swollen appendix after a two-month smuggling odyssey from Fujian province.

After 70 days sealed off in a filthy ship’s hull with nearly 200 others, Yuen landed on a deserted shore in Baja, California. Mexican smugglers took over, splitting their Chinese cargo into smaller groups and shepherding them across the Mexican border on foot.

Several passengers wrote suicide notes during the grueling ocean voyage, awaiting only the chance to get above deck and jump to their deaths, Yuen recalled. Water was so scarce that passengers were often granted only one sip a day, and smugglers sold additional quarts for $10 apiece.

After crossing the border, Chinese smugglers loaded Yuen and the others into a van and brought him to a San Gabriel Valley safehouse, where he was prodded to secure $29,000 from his uncle, who lives in New York.

Yuen said he escaped smugglers only when they dumped him at an Alhambra hospital for an emergency appendectomy. He now lives on the East Coast.

Many other Chinese immigrants did not reach their goal. In May, the Coast Guard intercepted the fishing ship Chin Lung Hsiang (Golden Dragon) when it ventured into U.S. territorial waters. More than 200 people were seized and processed for deportation. Seven suspected smugglers were held on federal charges.

Responding to the arrival of similar smuggling ships during the summer, President Clinton proposed new government efforts to crack down on smuggling of illegal immigrants by organized crime syndicates that, he said, were engaged in “trafficking in human beings for profit.”

Since the summer, the reports of boatloads of Chinese immigrants making their way to the United States have nearly ceased. But few doubt that more attempts will be made. Lin, 16, said many Chinese without political or business connections seek improved living conditions in the United States. And coming in a smuggling ship, Lin said, “is the only way out.”

Counting the Undocumented

Immigrants from all over the world are drawn to enter the United States illegally. Here is a look at the countries that are thought to have been a source of most illegal immigration, as of October, 1992. Since these estimates were made, the U.S. total has grown by another 300,000, officials believe.

1992 STATE AND NATIONAL ESTIMATES

U.S. total: 3,217,800 California total: 1,283,000 SOURCE COUNTRIES

Top regions and countries of origin of estimated illegal immigrants residing in the United States and California as of October, 1992.

Region/country U.S. total California total * North and Central America 2,096,300 972,000 Canada 103,700 26,000 Mexico 1,001,600 596,000 El Salvador 298,500 187,000 Guatemala 121,300 83,000 Honduras 69,100 27,000 Nicaragua 75,600 33,000 Belize 15,000 9,000 Other N. and C. America 411,500 12,000 * Asia 339,400 142,000 China 24,200 5,000 India 30,400 10,000 Iran 37,400 19,000 Israel 28,000 7,000 Lebanon 18,600 10,000 Philippines 101,500 68,000 Other Asia 99,300 23,000 * Europe 316,600 48,000 France 15,400 6,000 Ireland 36,900 7,000 Italy 67,300 13,000 Portugal 31,500 5,000 Other Europe 165,500 17,000 * South America 204,000 36,000 Columbia 75,200 9,000 Ecuador 53,300 8,000 Peru 28,500 9,000 Other S. America 47,000 9,000 * Africa 124,000 13,000 * Oceania 16,300 10,000 * Stateless/unknown 121,200 61,000

Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service

*

Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein in Washington and Lee Romney in Los Angeles contributed to the story.

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.