Citizenship Classes Bulge, Fueled by Fear

Across Southern California, immigrants are flooding citizenship classes, hoping to beat a threatened cutoff of government aid under the new welfare reform act.

Schools, senior centers, churches and community centers report a rush for the classes, which prepare applicants for the test required for United States citizenship.

The trend began before President Clinton signed the Republican-crafted welfare bill on Aug. 22, severely limiting aid to noncitizens, and has grown more intense since.

“There seems to be a lot of panic and terrible fear,” said Lori Litel, director of the East Valley Multipurpose Senior Center in North Hollywood. “It’s pandemonium.”

Litel said callers inquiring about the center’s citizenship classes have increased 300% in the past few weeks, as legal residents--particularly the elderly or disabled--worry that their benefits will be cut off if they do not become U.S. citizens.

There are similar reports from around Southern California.

* In Santa Ana, the Vietnamese Community Center of Orange County plans to open a new office to accommodate a 40% increase in the number of people who want to take citizenship classes.

* At adult schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, teachers and administrators are bracing for a 33% surge in students this fall, up from 55,000 last year.

* In Ventura County, the social service group El Concilio del Condado de Ventura has watched as the size of its citizenship classes jumped from 40 to 100, and its workshops from about 40 to 70.

* At Mary Immaculate Church in Pacoima, calls for citizenship classes have tripled--from about 150 in a typical week to 500 the week that Clinton signed the welfare bill into law.

* At Hermandad Mexicana in Santa Ana, which provides services to mostly Latino immigrants, the 400-person enrollment in its citizenship classes is double the normal size.

The classes, which are usually free, are not required but provide basic English language skills and tutoring with test questions on U.S. history and government. Typically, students attend three or four classes before they take the test. The classes are often buttressed by courses in English as a second language.

Legal permanent residents are citizens of another nation, hold green cards and are required to pay U.S. taxes. They are often related to U.S. citizens, and while they are eligible for U.S. citizenship, many have decided against it for one reason or another. The only significant difference in everyday life between permanent residents and U.S. citizens, immigration advocates say, is that noncitizens are not allowed to vote.

Illegal immigrants are not eligible for U.S. citizenship or for most welfare benefits.

Gov. Pete Wilson recently ordered state agencies to stop providing services to illegal immigrants as a first step in implementing the federal welfare legislation. The federal law could take away as much as $6.8 billion in welfare funds from Sacramento over the next six years.

While it is still unclear how legal permanent residents will fare under the state’s restructured welfare program, immigrants and their advocates fear that the new guidelines, which will probably be phased in during the next 18 months or more, will also cut off their aid.

“In general, it’s creating a lot of anxiety,” said Charles Kim, executive director of the Korean American Coalition, an advocacy group based in Koreatown that assists immigrants in applying for citizenship.

“I’ve heard from people who’ve read about it and then fainted. To some people, it’s a life and death matter.”

Under the federal law, immigrants who are legal residents become ineligible to receive food stamps or Supplemental Security Income, a federal program aiding the poor, elderly and disabled, after one year.

Further, citizens of other nations who legally come to the United States in the future will be denied most benefits during their first five years in the U.S.

Exceptions in the federal law are made for legal residents who are veterans or are serving in the armed forces, and those who have worked at least 10 years without receiving federal aid.

The legislation is expected to hit California and the Los Angeles area particularly hard. According to a state study, as many as 40% of legal permanent residents who receive existing federal benefits live in California, and one-half of those live in Los Angeles County.

“Because they don’t have voting power, they have been singled out,” said Kim, who estimates that the population of legal residents in the Los Angeles area’s Korean-American community numbers between 350,000 and 400,000.

Richard Rogers, district director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said it is too early to guess what effect the welfare law will have.

But no matter what effect that is, he said, he does not expect any increase in the current backlog of 140,000 citizenship applications.

The reason, Rogers said, is that many of the state’s legal residents were already spurred by Proposition 187 to start the naturalization process. The voter-approved initiative to ban most illegal citizens from schools and care at public hospitals was blocked by a federal judge.

The INS will process about 58,000 applications this month--twice as many as the agency processed in April. The agency has worked hard to quicken the process, and by the end of this month it will take just six months from application to swearing in, compared to years in the past, Rogers said.

But despite the trend, advocates worry about legal immigrants who have not heard about the new law yet and might not realize that there has been a change until their checks fail to arrive.

“These are not people who read the newspaper or listen [closely to the news],” said a field representative for a local elected official. “They don’t understand the mechanism that brings the check, and they won’t understand why the check will stop coming. But it’s gonna hit the fan when the checks stop,” which could occur as early as next year.

For now, though, even permanent residents who have resisted U.S. citizenship for years are enrolling in citizenship classes.

“I didn’t want to become a U.S. citizen because I thought I would return to El Salvador one day,” said 51-year-old Maria Sosa, who has lived in the United States for 14 years and recently signed up for a class near her Westlake home. “But because I need my SSI check, I need to become a citizen. Otherwise, I might die.”

At Oxnard Adult School, applications for the classes have more than doubled. Before the welfare bill was signed, the school received 20 to 50 applications in a typical week. Last week, they received between 70 and 100.

“I am not getting a sense of panic but a sense of concern and immediacy,” said Traci Martinez, the school’s citizenship outreach coordinator.

The elderly appear to be most concerned about the law, and are apprehensive about the difficulty in passing the test, advocates say.

“I get old people who come to me and they say their memory is not very good any more and they are very worried about taking the test,” said Jim Sun, president of the Asian American Senior Service Center in Santa Ana.

Once they pass the test, however, some advocates believe the new citizens will remember which politicians were supportive and which were not, once they start to vote.

“It’s kind of like a wake-up call,” said Guadalupe Jara, director of the Citizenship Center at Mission College in Sylmar. “They really feel like the law is anti-immigrant, and they want to vote, they want their say.”

Times staff writer Andrew Blankstein contributed to this story.