The Long Road to Citizenship

Sixteen years ago, Carlos Castillo crossed into California illegally, at night, his heart pounding as he evaded immigration agents on the border.

Friday morning, his heart was pounding again for very different reasons. Seated with more than 3,000 other immigrants in the Los Angeles Convention Center, as his wife, Laura, snapped pictures from the sidelines, Castillo proudly took the oath of citizenship and was congratulated by an official of the same immigration agency he once dreaded.

It was a long and often difficult road that took Castillo from Cuernavaca, Mexico, to Irvine, where he and his wife share a suburban home with two teenage daughters. And his trek from illegal immigrant to citizen in many ways illustrates the shifting mood toward immigrants in his adopted country.

Interest in citizenship has soared lately among immigrants, who must be legal permanent residents for at least five years to qualify. At the same time, laws regulating who qualifies have become more restrictive. For example, said INS Assistant District Director Jane Arellano, a conviction for laundering $10,000 or more now forever bars an immigrant from becoming a citizen.

Also, background checks have been tightened and the INS must now wait for a definitive response from the FBI on all fingerprint records, Arellano said. These days, a smudged fingerprint could hold up an application for months.

The result is a tremendous backlog--about 230,000 applicants in the seven-county Los Angeles District alone, including 50,000 who have been approved but are awaiting a naturalization ceremony, Arellano said. Meanwhile, about 1,000 residents fill out new citizenship applications every day.

In part, the heightened interest is driven by new legislation that cuts government benefits to noncitizens. But of the 7,000 new citizens who took the oath in two massive ceremonies Friday, many said they were driven by something more subtle, and more profound--a shift in perception that has spotlighted a “noncitizen” class, often in negative terms.

Castillo was among them. When he became a legal permanent resident through a 1986 immigration reform law that granted amnesty to some long-term undocumented immigrants, he said he felt enormous relief. No more hiding, no more uncertainty, no more shame.

“I felt secure in this country,” Castillo recalled. “But now even saying legal resident doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t matter, even if you went through eight years of waiting for your papers. That paper doesn’t count for much anymore, and that’s creating a lot of stress and hate.”

The shift toward spotlighting noncitizens rather than illegal immigrants is not surprising, said Saeed Ali, who coordinates citizenship programs for a network of community colleges and nonprofit organizations and is also a consultant to the Hispanic Caucus of the California Legislature. He said similar changes in attitude occurred in the 1920s, when a movement was born in California to deny land ownership to all foreign born.

Ali predicted another shift in the near future--one that would divide native-born from nonnative Americans. “It is very nostalgic and a little frightening to read what is happening today, because you can see where the next step will go,” Ali said.

Art Montez, president of the Santa Ana chapter of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said he and others predicted just such a shift during debate over Proposition 187, the 1994 California initiative to cut education, medical care and other public benefits to illegal immigrants. The initiative was approved by voters, but has been challenged in state and federal courts.

“During 187, we kept saying this is what [the initiative’s backers] are intending to do, that they intend to cut all benefits to all these immigrants whether they’re legal residents or not. And they kept denying it and denying it,” Montez said. “But now we see it happened.”

“You know, there’s an old saying in Texas that if you put a frog in water and raise the heat slowly, it will sit there and cook to death. Well, we’re in a Crock-Pot right now.”

Castillo’s case, which is the quintessential immigrant success story, provides a glimpse of how attitudes toward immigration have shifted in the recent past.

He first crossed the border illegally in 1981, when the Border Patrol was understaffed and fighting a negative public image. His crossing was far easier than it would have been this winter, when more than a dozen illegal immigrants died in freezing rains while trying to evade a beefed-up immigration force by walking for days through the mountains east of San Diego.

When Castillo arrived, he said, jobs for undocumented workers were more available, and a vein of sympathy ran through the state, which helped prompt passage of the 1986 immigration reform act known as amnesty.

After arriving, Castillo lived temporarily in a crowded apartment with relatives in Garden Grove and eventually moved to Santa Ana, while occasionally crossing back into Mexico to visit his wife, Laura, in Ensenada, on the coast of Baja California.

He arranged for Laura and the couple’s two children to immigrate legally to California after he obtained residency status. Laura, who also was a successful citizenship applicant, is now awaiting her own swearing-in ceremony.

His natural curiosity and gregariousness made the transition relatively smooth: He picked up English quickly, practicing with bus drivers on his commute; at the large engineering firm where he worked, he quickly made friends who helped him move up from clerk to draftsman.

Castillo said he barely made the residency requirement to qualify for the 1986 amnesty law, remembering how he glued old pay stubs to a sheet of paper to prove to immigration authorities that he had been in the United States since 1981. When that approval came back, he felt enormous relief. “I knew I had made it,” he said.

Last year, however, when Castillo became eligible for citizenship, he didn’t waste a moment to apply. It took one year of filling out paperwork, studying for a civics and history test, talking to immigration officers, and, above all, waiting, before he was able to finally take that oath.

“It’s a lot of work and a lot of worries if your papers are going to go through,” he said. “It’s really tough. It puts a lot of pressure on you and your family, because they know you are trying to be approved and you might be turned down.”

In fact, said Arellano of the INS, about 15% of applicants have been denied in recent months for reasons ranging from lack of English and history skills to a finding of bad moral character.

Arellano said the INS expects the numbers of applicants to continue growing over the next year, as legal immigrants become aware of cuts in benefits, and may approach the waves of interest in citizenship in 1992 and 1994 when the district office received 1,500 to 2,000 applications a day.

To keep up with that pace, the agency has scheduled massive swearing-in ceremonies at the convention center through late summer, anticipating some 120,000 new citizens.