Complex Family Ties Tangle Simple Premise of Prop. 187 : Immigrants: Impact includes problems of splitting up parents, children and spouses of mixed legal status.

For sponsors of Proposition 187, the issue is simple: Illegal immigrants, by definition lawbreakers, should be denied public services and promptly turned in to authorities. Those who do not volunteer to leave should be swiftly deported.

“Illegal aliens have no right to be here,” said Ron Prince, chairman of the Proposition 187 campaign.

But for Dora Figueroa and many of the other estimated 1.7 million unlawful immigrants in California, the situation is much more complicated.

Most undocumented people are closely related to U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents, often wives, husbands, parents, siblings or children. Many are in the process of seeking papers, usually via spouses or other relatives who are legal residents entitled to petition for loved ones under the principle of family reunification, long a cornerstone of U.S. immigration policy.

Mass deportation would inevitably mean the splitting of hundreds of thousands of families, including many whose members are on official waiting lists for green cards. Immigration today is very much a family affair, assisted and encouraged by networks of relatives well-established in the United States.

In the case of Figueroa, she is the wife of a lawful permanent resident and the mother of a 2-year-old boy, Michael Scott, a U.S. citizen. She is 8 months pregnant with another child.

“My life is here now,” said Figueroa, who slipped across the U.S.-Mexico border four years ago, completing what has become a rite of passage for millions of extended families, an exodus that redefined California’s demographics--and has triggered an angry backlash among the voting majority. “What scares people most is the idea of being separated from their families, from their children.”

Whatever Proposition 187’s fate in the courts, the essentially familial nature of immigration--combined with the limited capabilities of an overtaxed immigration bureaucracy--weigh against any large-scale repatriations, such as the mass return of Mexican nationals during the anti-immigrant campaigns of the 1930s and 1950s.

“How can I leave? My children are American,” said Tammy (she asked that her surname not be used). Tammy, her husband, Haim, and three young children arrived from Israel seven years ago and opted to overstay their visitors’ visas, never going back.

Those who overstay their visas, who make up at least half of the illegal immigrants nationwide, face the same problem as those who jump the border. The families of undocumented Europeans, Canadians, Asians and others who violated their entry visas include many U.S.-born children or relatives awaiting legal status via relatives or through other applications.

“My little girls wouldn’t know what the Philippines is like,” said one undocumented Los Angeles mother of six children, of whom only the two youngest are U.S. citizens. Neither of the two speaks Tagalog, the language of their ancestral homeland.

If the courts uphold Proposition 187, she and others could be turned in as suspected illegal immigrants by educators at their children’s schools, by health workers and social service providers, and by police officers who may stop them for a traffic violation.

Yet the woman, like most illegal immigrants interviewed, said she had no intention of returning to her homeland voluntarily--the “self-deportation” process that Proposition 187 advocates hope will unfold.

In the event she is reported to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, arrested and forced to return, Dora Figueroa, for one, vows to be back quickly.

“I’ll go down and bring her back myself,” said her husband, Daniel Gomez, as he and his wife relaxed on a recent evening in their apartment on Los Angeles’ Eastside, one of the nation’s most populous new-immigrant enclaves.

In the last 15 years or so, scholars say, immigration from Mexico and Central America--by far the principal homelands of California’s undocumented multitudes--has become more of a deeply rooted, family-driven phenomenon. Long gone is the era when most were migrant men following the harvests and returning annually to their families in Mexico.

“When I first came here, I thought I would work for a while, save some money, and then go back to Mexico,” Gomez said. “But as time goes on, that is more and more of an illusion.”

A onetime illegal immigrant, Gomez obtained U.S. residency via the amnesty program of 1987-88, a sweeping law that conferred legal status on 3 million formerly undocumented residents, almost three-quarters of them Mexican nationals. It was the world’s largest immigration amnesty, and its consequences were far-reaching, particularly for California, home of more than half of all amnesty beneficiaries.

Soon, Gomez and other newly legalized residents began sending for others, beckoning them to the land of opportunity. The U.S.-Mexico border proved to be a porous barrier. A great unintended consequence of the amnesty program, experts agree, was to open the gates to a new influx of unlawful immigration by loved ones and acquaintances.

Ironically, presiding over the amnesty process were two Californians--Alan C. Nelson, former national commissioner of the INS, and Harold W. Ezell, ex-INS western chief--who were later among the authors of Proposition 187.

Three of Gomez’s brothers eventually came north, successfully making the dash across the border, as did his future wife, Dora Figueroa, whom he had known since boyhood in their hometown of Colima, Mexico. More often than not, according to immigrants and scholars, established relatives such as Gomez served as the newcomers’ anchors and social safety nets, providing friends and family with a place to stay, a hot meal, someone to talk to and, as often as not, a crucial job contact.

Gomez said he has never sought public benefits, though the family might qualify for welfare or food stamps for their U.S. citizen child, considering the father’s average weekly income of $250 to $300 as a construction worker. Unaccustomed to such government largess in his native Mexico, Gomez said he would rather not apply and draw official attention upon his family.

Despite a widespread perception to the contrary, various studies--including an extensive 1992 INS report on amnesty recipients--concluded that illegal immigrants have been comparatively small users of health and social services. In fact, illegal immigrants are excluded by statute from most big-ticket entitlement programs, such as food stamps, welfare and unemployment insurance.

One service widely used is prenatal care provided under the state-funded Medi-Cal program. Proposition 187 bans such aid to illegal immigrants. Gov. Pete Wilson has acted to cut off prenatal assistance, although that directive is on hold because of a temporary restraining order issued after the election against all major provisions of the initiative.

Cutting pregnancy aid would surely make life more difficult for many illegal immigrants--”I don’t know where I’d go for my checkups,” said Figueroa, a Medi-Cal recipient--but it would also affect a future generation of U.S. citizens.

Undocumented mothers will continue to give birth at California hospitals and clinics--delivery is an emergency service, still to be available even if Proposition 187 passes legal muster. And if complications arise after birth because of an absence of prenatal care, these newborn citizens will be eligible for the full range of public benefits.

Another principal provision of Proposition 187--prohibiting illegal immigrants from attending public schools and colleges--also tugs at family bonds. Take the case of the Ericka Tejeda and her six children, all residents of Los Angeles’ Westlake district, a run-down barrio west of Downtown that is home to many Central Americans who fled the warfare and grinding poverty of their homelands.

Tejeda, a 30-year-old native of Guatemala City, braved the border crossing on a rainy winter evening a decade ago while cradling her then-infant daughter, Claudia, now 12. Mother and daughter remain without papers, but Claudia’s younger siblings--Jose, 10, Ericka, 8, Olemi, 7, Deborah, 5, and Andrea, 4--were all born in Los Angeles and are U.S. citizens.

Under Proposition 187, Claudia would have to leave public school while her siblings could remain in the classroom. The school district would be required to report Claudia and her mother to the INS.

“I like school,” said Claudia, a sixth-grader, the other day in the family’s two-bedroom apartment, decorated with photographs of Claudia and her classmates and woven tapestries of sylvan scenes--an oxcart carrying wood, women washing clothing in a rushing stream against a backdrop of majestic volcanoes--depicting a native land that the girl does not remember.

Asked what she would like to be when she is older, Claudia replied: “A lawyer. I’d like to help Latinos.”

As U.S. citizens, Claudia’s five brothers and sisters qualify the family for a range of public services, including federal welfare payments of $824 a month and food stamps totaling $290 monthly, according to the mother. The family’s eligibility would not change under Proposition 187, though Ericka Tejeda would risk being reported to the INS by going to the county social service office.

Proposition 187 proponents argue that the availability of such benefits lures unlawful immigrants. But Tejeda said she was unaware of such programs until she arrived.

The Tejeda family also receives a federal rent subsidy, something that advocates have waged a lengthy legal battle to preserve for the many families, such as the Tejedas, who include legal and undocumented members.

“It is a misnomer to think of an undocumented population that can be easily identified and removed,” said Charles Wheeler, directing attorney of the Los Angeles-based National Immigration Law Center, which has filed one of eight lawsuits challenging Proposition 187. “These people, by and large, have been here for several years and established family connections.”

Carlos Bolanos has been in the United States since 1983, when he fled his rural coastal homeland in El Salvador’s war-ravaged Sonsonate province and made the odyssey through Central America to Tijuana, where he jumped the border en route to the home of relatives in Los Angeles.

Today, part owner (along with an in-law) of a home in the San Fernando Valley, Bolanos remains undocumented, as do his three eldest children--though his wife, Teolinda Alvarado, has temporary legal status and his 10-month-old daughter, Gabriela, was born in the United States.

“It would be very difficult for us to return now to El Salvador,” Bolanos said recently.

Once a campesino, Bolanos has been making a living rebuilding alternators and other automotive parts at a San Fernando Valley shop for $5.80 an hour. He long ago sold his ancestral plot of land back home, he said, in order to help raise money for a house down payment here. He has never received public assistance, he says, and has always paid his taxes, just as he regularly sent a chunk of his paycheck back home each month to his family.

His eldest three children--Oscar Arturo, 16, Elsa, 14, and Marvin, 10--arrived in the United States in May, finally uniting a family that had been divided for more than a decade. Now, with Proposition 187 on the books and a growing hostility toward illegal immigrants, Bolanos dreads the prospect of a family forced to split anew.

“It would be a great blow if my (eldest) could not go to school,” he said. “Our idea is that we would all have a life together, and my children would have better opportunities in this country. Now they say we have to go back. Go back to what?”