Amid Bitter Debate, Thousands of Immigrants Pack Up to Leave : Borders: Despite America’s image as a land of opportunity, one man’s decision to leave is not unusual. The exodus may increase as anti-immigrant fever continues to spread.

Alejandro Soriano was working as a TV news researcher in Peru when he decided to move to New York, hoping to land a job in television production. But with limited English and a lack of connections, he ended up cleaning air shafts in public housing for $4.50 an hour.

After five rough months, he moved to San Francisco to try his luck there. He lasted only a few weeks, two spent as a cook at a fast-food restaurant.

“One morning I said, ‘This is enough. I’m leaving,’ ” Soriano said by phone from Mexico City, where he lives now with relatives. “I came with a lot of illusions, expecting to improve my quality of life. . . . The picture I have now for the United States is not that attractive.”

Despite America’s still vivid image as a golden land of opportunity--with millions clamoring to get in--Soriano’s decision to leave is hardly unusual.

Much has been made of the 8.7 million legal immigrants who arrived in the 1980s, but less attention has been paid to the nearly 2 million who left during that decade, according to a new government study.

Their reasons for leaving are varied.

Some get fed up or disillusioned with America, or they miss their families and the “old country.” Many go home to stretch their retirement dollars. Still others came only to study, learn a trade or earn enough money for a house or piece of land back home, never intending to settle here permanently.

And the outward exodus may even increase as anti-immigrant fever spreads in the United States. Proposition 187, which would deny public social services to illegal aliens, passed last fall in California and is now in the courts. The new Republican leaders in Congress are considering a plan to deny welfare benefits to most legal immigrants as well.

“No one wants to be in a place where they’re constantly being told that they’re not wanted, despite the fact that they’re working very hard and often at jobs that others won’t do,” said Saramaria Archila, executive director of the Latin American Integration Center in the New York City borough of Queens. “It contributes to this general frustration.”

Technology also has had an impact. The telecommunications revolution has made staying in touch with family and friends a continent away easier, and jet travel has made moving from place to place less of an ordeal.

The result is that immigration doesn’t have “the same feel of permanence that it had in the past,” said Paul Finnegan, executive director of the Emerald Isle Immigration Center in Queens. New arrivals “don’t feel cut off from their old country and settle in as they did in the past.”

The U.S. government gave up trying to keep track of people moving out during the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration. “The numbers were considered to be underestimates,” said Bob Warren, director of statistics for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Yet recent historical research has found that large numbers of immigrants have been giving up on America and heading home since Colonial days.

One study, co-authored by Warren, concluded that about one-third of the 30 million immigrants who arrived in the United States between 1900 and 1980 left to go home or settle elsewhere.

They have gone largely unnoticed, historians say, partly because their departure doesn’t jibe with the American dream.

“Emigration is the very negation of America,” said University of Cincinnati professor Roger Daniels, author of “Coming to America,” a history of immigration. “It’s a kind of cultural treason. So it’s not something that people talk about very much.”

The number is still tough to tally, mainly because people don’t always end up doing what they say they would. “If you tried to collect that data from people leaving the country, all you would be getting is intentions,” Warren said.

Based on recent studies, the Census Bureau estimates 133,000 foreign-born residents emigrate from the United States annually. But a study published in December by the bureau’s own statisticians found emigration between 1980 and 1990 was about 195,000 a year, mainly due to increased immigration during the decade.

Statistical research and anecdotal evidence indicates that older immigrants are more likely to go back than those who arrive as children or young adults, mainly because it’s harder to learn a new language and adjust to a new culture later in life. In addition, many are retired and can live better back home on the money they get from Social Security.

Political refugees or those escaping fighting at home often cannot return. Families fleeing poverty or economic crises at home are less apt to go back than immigrants from Canada or western Europe.

Those most likely to return are those who traveled the least distance to get here, experts say. A recent INS survey of naturalization rates--a possible indicator of who is planning to stay--found the lowest rates were among people from western Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America and Canada.

“I have plenty of friends, they come here, they earn their money and they return,” said Mario Vasquez, a 27-year-old immigrant from Costa Rica who works at the Hispanic Federation of New York City.

Others simply find the realities of life in the United States to be far different than what they expected.

Joanna Rajkowska, a 26-year-old struggling artist from Poland, arrived in New York in 1993 with all her savings--$500--10 days after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow.

“I was convinced that it’s very easy to get into any program in a good art school here,” she said. “Obviously I didn’t have any idea how difficult it is.”

Her husband, a doctor forced to work as a medical assistant because he didn’t pass the required tests, went back to Poland in January after a promised research job fell through. Rajkowska wants to join him, but is waiting two more months to find out if she gets accepted to Yale.

“All your background, your tradition, your childhood--just your past--is just attracting you back,” she said. “It’s hard to live, for me, with this consciousness that I’m not from here. I’m not rooted in this tradition. This is frustrating, and I didn’t expect that it would be so important.”

Yet for most immigrants--even those planning to go back--the longer they stay, the less likely they are to leave. “They become American often without even knowing it or willing it,” said Wendy Shimelman of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union Immigration Project.

“We do know that people go back,” she said. “What’s surprising more often, at least to the people themselves, is not that they go back, but that they stay.”