Food Stamp Reprieve Is Welcome News

For Viet Luong, a carpenter from Saigon living with his family in a cramped apartment in Garden Grove, the prospect of losing food stamps is like a death sentence.

“When that day comes, I am going to be hungry, and my children will be hungry too,” said Luong, who was interviewed at the Vietnamese Community Center in Santa Ana. “In Vietnam, if you are hungry, you can go to a field and dig potatoes. Here, where can I go?”

But at least for Luong and other legal immigrants in Orange County, there was good news after Gov. Pete Wilson’s decision late Thursday to extend a deadline that would have cut food stamp benefits to as many a 430,000 legal immigrants statewide by April 1. In Orange County, 14,000 recipients are affected. Those benefits will be extended through August, county officials said.

The bulk of those affected in Orange County are Southeast Asians, predominantly refugees from Vietnam, and some Latinos, many of whom have been pouring into social services centers desperate and seeking answers.

Mai Cong, who heads the board of directors for the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., said hundreds of Vietnamese in recent weeks have come into the center pleading for help.

“They see me and ask, ‘Can you help us? Can you do something for us?’ ” Cong said. “It’s had an impact here. It’s putting a lot of pressure on them and us.”

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At Catholic Charities in Santa Ana, where many poor Spanish-speaking immigrants have reached a “panic mode,” the extension has given the agency and its clients some breathing room, said Raoul Aroz, the agency’s deputy director. The organization was forced to beef up its counseling services to help poor clients fearful about their future, and also to help them find alternative solutions.

“We had quite a few people coming in trying to get answers, to clear things up,” Aroz said. “This has prompted an in-depth concern, not just about food, but the choice between food and shelter. . . . For them, the impact is they have to get jobs or move in with relatives or take other steps.

“For us,” Aroz added, “at least it buys us some time to provide that counseling.”

While officials of some charities and their clients criticized welfare reform measures, proponents praised them as a way of moving poor people off welfare and into jobs.

Supervisor William G. Steiner said he was supportive of welfare reform, because handouts undermine self-esteem. But he was aware of the importance of giving food to the poor.

“There are some tough measures that need to be taken to get people into the job market and into self-sufficiency,” Steiner said. “But they shouldn’t be reckless measures. They should be thoughtful and planned.”

For many of the immigrants, food stamps have played a large role in their survival.

Luong said he, his wife and his 5- and 6-year-old children, get about $250 worth of food every month from the food stamp program. Luong said that as part of the GAIN federal work program, he arranges vegetables in a supermarket for $4.75 an hour several times a week. But those earnings are barely enough to pay rent and utilities on his $490-per-month apartment.

Hau Cong Dau, 78, and his wife rely on the $110 a month they get in food stamp benefits. A taxi driver in Saigon, he said he applied for work here but has found none. Now his grown children supplement the food stamp benefits as they can, but Dau said their help is not enough.

“They have their own families to take care of. They can’t take care of me for the rest of my life,” Dau said. “If the government can keep helping us, we appreciate it very much. If it can’t, well, we haven’t thought about what to do.”

Dau, who came to the United States just over five years ago, said he wants to become a U.S. citizen so his benefits won’t be threatened.

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“It’s very important to us,” Dau said. “We need food to eat, to live, to survive.”

But time is not on his side, said Robert Griffith, director of financial assistance for the county’s Social Services Agency, who noted that immigration authorities have a backlog of naturalization cases.

Griffith said that while the governor’s extension is good news, at best it is only a temporary reprieve from the inevitable.

“The only way this group can qualify after September is if Congress changes the law,” he said. “And that has been talked about, though it is unlikely.”

Griffith said local officials had urged Eloise Anderson, the director of the state Department of Social Services, to lobby the governor for an extension, as well as a waiver on procedures.

“The problem,” Griffith said, “is we have 14,000 cases in Orange County that would have had to be processed in one month [when the deadline expires] and that’s impossible. Only one-twelfth of the caseloads come up for review monthly.”

Griffith said county officials received a fax from the governor’s office about 7 p.m. Thursday, announcing Wilson’s action. Griffith’s staff spent Friday on the telephone with their counterparts in Sacramento, trying to get information about the waiver.

But the extension has given optimists such as the Vietnamese Community’s Cong hope that politicians and policy-makers can reach a more benevolent decision than terminating food stamp benefits.

“With the outcry from many quarters in California, people are becoming more and more aware of disadvantaged people who need help,” Cong said. “This will give more time for decision-makers to think it over and answer what we can do as a society to figure this out.”