House Approves Nicaraguan and Cuban Amnesty

Capping a controversy ringing with echoes of the Cold War, the House passed legislation just before midnight Wednesday that grants amnesty to Nicaraguan and Cuban immigrants and helps 500,000 settlers from Guatemala, El Salvador and Eastern Europe avert deportation.

“It is historic,” Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a chief sponsor of the provision, declared on the House floor. “It is in the great, generous, compassionate tradition of the United States.”

A major retreat from tough new immigration rules passed last year, the bill--which is expected to get a Senate nod today and be signed into law quickly by President Clinton--reflects a Republican attempt to soften the party’s anti-immigrant image.

But while the measure eases the road to permanent residency for hundreds of thousands of immigrants--about half of them living in Southern California--it was denounced by some immigrant advocates for creating an insidious hierarchy among refugees based on the politics of the places they fled.

“Persecution is persecution,” Cecilia Munoz, of the National Council of La Raza, complained at a recent news conference. “It doesn’t matter who was on the other side of the gun in your home country, it matters that you fled for your life.”

The legislation helps Guatemalans, Salvadorans and immigrants from the former Soviet Union stave off deportation by considering their cases under more lenient guidelines than provided in the 1996 immigration law. But these immigrants must still prove at a hearing that it would be a hardship to leave.

All Nicaraguans and Cubans who apply, however, will automatically be granted permanent residency.

Left out entirely, to the chagrin of many black political leaders, are Haitian refugees.

“This is the most cynical kind of public policymaking that I’ve ever witnessed,” exclaimed Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. “This is unconscionable. It is unreasonable. It is unfair, it is unjust, it is unkind. It is everything I can think of.”

Lawmakers pledged to pass legislation granting similar relief to Haitians next year, and the White House plans to delay deportations until then.

Critics are also incensed because the legislation slashes by 10,000 annually the number of legal immigrant visas available.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) likened the measure to “taking food from one child to give another” and warned that it would pit Latinos against one another in America’s cities. “The Cold War is going to be fought all over again,” he said.

The measure was linked to a bill funding District of Columbia government, which was approved on a voice vote as Congress hurtled toward adjournment for the year. Lawmakers are scheduled to take up the last of 13 appropriations bills today.

Wednesday night’s action culminated months of heated negotiations launched this summer when the Clinton administration unveiled plans to allow Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans to apply to have their deportations suspended under rules in effect before last April 1, when the tough new guidelines approved by Congress in 1996 went into place.

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The old rules allow immigrants to remain in the United States if they are of good moral character, have lived here for seven years and can show that their expulsion would be an “extreme hardship.” The new legislation requires them to have been in the United States a decade and show that if they were deported, a parent, spouse or child who is a U.S. citizen or legal resident would suffer “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship.”

After the 1996 law passed, leaders of Central American nations begged U.S. politicians not to send thousands of refugees home, fearing the influx could topple economies ravaged by years of civil war.

Conservatives in Congress originally opposed the Clinton plans, but Florida Republicans--sensitive to the state’s large Cuban and Nicaraguan populations--and former Reagan administration officials took up the cause, focusing on the Nicaraguans who fled their country when the leftist Sandinistas reigned and Washington was backing a guerrilla war against that regime. Officials estimate Nicaraguan beneficiaries of the amnesty could top 100,000, because it protects everyone who arrived by 1995--five years after the Sandinistas fell from power. About 10,000 Nicaraguans live around Los Angeles.

But the political consensus backing relief for Nicaraguans did not extend to their Central American neighbors, who left Guatemala and El Salvador while the United States provided military and political aid to governments fighting off insurgencies from the left.

As liberals fought for equal treatment for all the Central American groups, Republicans instead decided to add Cubans and immigrants from the former Soviet Union to the bill and rename it the “victims of communism relief act.”

“Why give amnesty to some and give nothing to others? There’s just a patent unfairness to it,” Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) said Wednesday. “Why treat immigrants differently even though they’re within the same universe?”

Becerra and others accused the GOP of “crass” political motives: pandering to Nicaraguans and Cubans, who tend to vote Republican, at the expense of more Democratic-leaning Latinos.

“They’re afraid that the pattern has been for new citizens to go anti-Republican. Maybe this is their effort to offset that,” Becerra said. “For those of us in L.A., this deal really smells. How many Nicaraguans do we have living in Los Angeles compared with Salvadorans or Guatemalans?”

Similar sentiments reverberated throughout Southern California, which has the nation’s largest concentration of Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants--about 250,000.

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During the past 10 days, Central American activists have marched outside the INS’ Los Angeles offices, staged vigils at churches, launched a hunger strike and gathered in the Pico-Union district to condemn what they viewed as unequal treatment by Congress.

“We have suffered as much as anyone and we feel the United States government has no right to treat us differently than others,” said Jose Salazar, 27, a Guatemalan immigrant whose 4-year-old son, Henry, was born in the United States. “This government helped perpetuate the war in our region and cannot now turn their backs on us.”

The tiered system hearkens back to the 1980s, when Republican administrations routinely granted political asylum to immigrants fleeing communist regimes but denied it to those who fled right-wing dictatorships. That pattern triggered a class-action legal settlement in 1990 granting temporary protection to about 260,000 Salvadorans and Guatemalans.

“We are all political refugees, and we all have the same moral right to remain here,” said Dora Alicia Tejada, president of the Salvadoran Assn. of Los Angeles, who came to the United States in 1989 from the San Salvador neighborhood of Soyopango, a leftist stronghold often targeted by right-wing death squads. “The United States helped promote the wars for years and now cannot cast us aside.”

Though elated at the pending amnesty, even some Nicaraguans lament the impact of the controversial legislation.

“Of course we’re happy with this, but the ideal for me would have been that other Central Americans received exactly what we received,” said Julio Cardoza of Casa Nicaragua, a social service agency based in South Gate. “I don’t like the concept of dividing the community.”

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Wilgoren reported from Washington, McDonnell from Los Angeles.

* CUTOFF OF CARE

A high court ruling allows the state to end prenatal care for illegal immigrants. A28