GOP Agrees to Plan for Limits on Deportations

Backtracking from tough immigration laws passed last year, congressional Republicans agreed Thursday to grant amnesty to about 50,000 Nicaraguan refugees and allow about 250,000 Guatemalans and Salvadorans--more than half of them living in Southern California--to avoid deportation if they have been in the country at least seven years and can prove that leaving would be a hardship.

The informal deal, to be presented as legislation later this month, would force about 70,000 immigrants from other countries who face deportation to meet stricter guidelines to obtain permanent residency. Many of these are Mexican nationals.

Also, to offset the status granted the Central Americans, the pact calls for the elimination of 10,000 legal immigration spots reserved annually for unskilled workers.

About half of the Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants expected to benefit from the proposed measure live in Southern California.

Some 50,000 Salvadorans live in Orange County, but it is not clear how many of them will be affected by the legislation. It is also unclear how many Guatemalan immigrants live in Orange County, but their number is believed to be small.

Orlando Recinos, who works at the El Salvador Express in Santa Ana, said the congressional compromise “is very good news for the many Salvadorans who have followed the law” to become legal permanent residents.

The Main Street store provides business services to local Salvadoran immigrants and serves as a nerve center for updates on political developments here and in El Salvador.

“There were a lot of nervous people who were waiting to hear what the government was going to do, but most Salvadorans believed that [Washington] would do the right thing,” Recinos said.

Jose Zeliya, a 21-year-old Disney animator, was buoyed by the measure.

“I’m really excited,” said Zeliya, who emigrated from El Salvador in 1988 and just bought a townhouse in Pacoima. “If I was to go back to my country, I wouldn’t know what to do--I would have to start all over again.”

Still unresolved in Congress is the future of a separate provision that allows illegal immigrants on green-card waiting lists to complete the application process in the United States. The expiration of that measure on Oct. 23 has provoked near-panic in immigrant communities nationwide and prompted many to consider leaving the country voluntarily, often splitting up their families, to preserve their chance for green cards.

Thursday’s breakthrough, announced by Reps. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), still faces debate and a vote in the House, and must be reconciled with a different approach taken by the Senate. But with strong backing by the Clinton administration, former Reagan Cabinet members and, now, previously dueling factions of the GOP, some broad relief for Central Americans seems assured.

The debate over the fate of the Central Americans echoes with remnants of the Cold War and has profound diplomatic implications for the entire region.

Central American leaders, their nations ravaged by decades of internal strife, have implored U.S. officials not to send thousands of their compatriots home, afraid that their tottering economies would topple under a mass return. In the United States, thousands of Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans who fled civil wars in their homelands also sought relief, citing the families and jobs they have established while living here. Most have been granted temporary legal status.

“These immigrants have become productive members of our communities and our work force, contributing to our city’s economic, cultural and social vitality,” Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan wrote to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno this summer.

Without congressional action, most of the affected Central Americans would face deportation. Pending applications for political asylum will probably be denied, since the wars in their homelands have ended.

Before Congress passed a landmark overhaul of immigration law last year, these immigrants could apply for permanent residency by seeking a “suspension of deportation,” as long as they had been in the United States for seven years and could show that it would cause them “extreme hardship” to leave.

But a provision of the 1996 immigration law tightened the hardship standards. The law said that hardship seekers had to have lived in the United States for a decade before applying, and toughened other requirements. It also set an annual cap of 4,000 who could be granted such relief.

“It’s only fair that we should not change the rules in midstream for these worried immigrants,” Sen. Michael DeWine (R-Ohio) said recently. “We, in essence, had made a deal with them.”

Smith, the leading foe of the relief bill until Thursday, said he has always wanted to help the Nicaraguans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans, but was worried that previous versions of the legislation also granted amnesty to many illegal immigrants from elsewhere. The new deal, he said, closes that loophole, yet still offers help to all Nicaraguans who arrived before December 1995 and to Guatemalans and Salvadorans who emigrated by 1990.

Almost 300,000 Central Americans could benefit directly from the proposed accord, but informal estimates indicate that an additional 200,000 or so direct family members--spouses and minor children--may also be able to obtain green cards under the deal now working its way through Congress.

In negotiations, Smith gained another chit, permanently lopping off the unskilled worker category of legal residents, which Smith contends is burdensome on an increasingly high-tech economy flooded with uneducated, low-skilled job seekers. However, the accord allowed about 90,000 low-skilled workers now in the immigration pipeline to continue pursuing their applications.

“This is a fairer bill because it distinguishes between various groups,” Smith said. “The Central Americans, because of fighting the good fight, because of being allies, because of unrest back home--there seems to be agreement . . . that the Central Americans . . . deserve special consideration. Nicaraguans deserve the most special [treatment] of all.”

Throughout the debate, there has been broad consensus on relief for Nicaraguans, most of whom are concentrated in South Florida and arrived when the leftist Sandinistas reigned in Managua and Washington was backing a rebel war against that regime. There was less political support, particularly among Republicans, for the much larger group of Salvadorans and Guatemalans, who fled their countries while the United States was funneling crucial aid to fight off insurgencies by left-wing guerrillas.

“Our concern is that it’s fair and that the law is applied fairly to victims of persecution, no matter where they came from on the political spectrum,” said Judy London, legal director of the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles. “The Salvadorans and Guatemalans have been at the end of the line for a long time now. They certainly don’t want to, once again, find themselves discriminated against.”

But while the deal may end infighting among Republicans on Capitol Hill, it raised the ire of some immigrant-rights advocates, as well as those seeking to restrict immigration into this country.

Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) expressed frustration that Smith and Diaz-Balart failed to consult the White House--which first proposed the Central American relief bill--or the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which Becerra chairs.

“It’s more for the Nicaraguans and less for everybody else,” Becerra said. “It’s divisive. It pits one group against the other.”

“This is a huge political cave-in,” said Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors a much stricter immigration policy. “The generosity of the American people has been turned against them.”

Times staff writers H.G. Reza in Orange County and Patrick J. McDonnell in Los Angeles contributed to this story.