Stronger Shields Sought Against Bias in Hiring

The scene is common, so common that many victims don’t even realize their rights have been violated. A legal immigrant goes looking for a job, work papers in hand, and is shown the door by a hostile employer who thinks the would-be worker looks or sounds “foreign.”

There are laws to protect immigrants from such discrimination. But in California, a mecca for newcomers, interviews and records reveal that a critical government partnership designed to enforce those laws and investigate abuses has all but collapsed in disuse.

Embarrassed federal and state officials are scrambling to fix the broken-down system but some suggest the damage has already been done: The number of immigrant-discrimination cases handled by the U.S. Justice Department has dwindled to less than half what it was five years ago.

Under a 1989 agreement, California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing is supposed to refer to federal authorities complaints from workers who believe they have been denied jobs, harassed for documents or discriminated against by employers who questioned their citizenship.

But that hasn’t been happening for years, frustrated Justice Department officials disclosed. They have instead come to rely on private groups in California to bring alleged abuses to their attention.

Still unclear is whether anti-immigrant politics or mere inattentiveness is to blame for the breakdown. Whatever the explanation, immigrant-rights activists have said the situation is inexcusable.

“It’s disturbing that the state with the highest percentage of immigration and the highest rate of discrimination would be so out of the loop,” said Charles Wheeler, senior attorney at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network in San Francisco. “That [state-federal] partnership was key to the enforcement of the law.”

Employers Demand More Documents

The issue is vital to hundreds of thousands of naturalized citizens, permanent residents and other legal workers who are wrongly suspected by potential employers of being “illegals.” Such workers often are bombarded with excessive and illegal requests from employers demanding they prove their citizenship or residency status, experts say, and the problem has proved particularly pervasive in Los Angeles.

The Justice Department office responsible for pursuing such abuses is seeking a stepped-up profile; last month it began running nationwide a series of TV spots to let legal immigrants know their rights. This month it scored the biggest victory in its 12-year history--a $367,000 judgment against a Maryland food-processing plant that was found to have imposed tougher hiring standards on noncitizens than on citizens.

With the office battling a history of lagging enforcement and chronic understaffing, one key step toward greater effectiveness could be restoring relations with fair-employment officials in the state with the nation’s highest percentage of foreign-born residents: California.

Consider Josefina Arreola, a 37-year-old woman from Mexico who lives in Palmdale with her husband and four children.

A naturalized U.S. citizen, Arreola applied for a job last year at a trailer-manufacturing plant in Lancaster called Lance Camper. Arreola, who speaks little English, offered her driver’s license to verify her identity, one of several dozen documents legally sufficient for immigrants to give to potential employers.

But the company representative demanded more documentation to prove that she was authorized to work in the United States, even though she assured him she was a citizen.

“The man said, ‘This is no good,’ ” Arreola recalled through an interpreter. “I became very flustered and very angry and didn’t know how to answer him. I didn’t understand why he discriminated against me when no one else had to prove they were a citizen. I just went home and cried.”

She contacted a Los Angeles immigrant-rights group, which informed her of her rights and referred her to the Justice Department. Attorneys there found that the company required only applicants who appeared to be Latino to produce Immigration and Naturalization Service documents. The Justice Department brought civil charges against the firm and won Arreola a $4,800 settlement, which she used to buy her daughters a computer.

No Cases Referred by California

A review of other successful claims brought by the Justice Department in the last year reflects the broad nature of problems faced by immigrants from various countries.

An Arkansas citizen was refused work as a poultry packer because she spoke Spanish and had visited Mexico. A permanent resident from Armenia was denied a job as a mail carrier after the Postal Service badgered him to produce INS documents, a case that prompted changes in postal hiring procedures. And a law office in New York City refused to consider a naturalized citizen for a typist’s job because of her Hispanic accent.

Such cases often are referred to the Justice Department by state agencies. But in California, state fair-employment officials have not referred any immigrant claims for years--and there has been virtually no communication between the two offices, said John D. Trasvina, who took over last year at the Justice Department’s office that handles immigration-related employment abuses.

In fact, the enforcement administrator at the state’s Fair Employment and Housing Department told a reporter she didn’t think California had such an arrangement with the federal government. A secretary later retrieved the agreement from an old file.

“I think somewhere [the partnership] just got lost in the shuffle,” said Barbara Osbourne, deputy director of the department.

Osbourne said the state has vigorously enforced claims of workplace discrimination based on people’s ancestries or national origins--whether a person is “brown-skinned,” for example. It handled more than 2,300 cases last year.

But she acknowledged that state and federal officials have made “minimal” efforts to coordinate the pursuit of claims of discrimination against noncitizens and naturalized citizens, which falls outside the state’s jurisdiction.

“We haven’t been working as closely together as we should,” she said.

That is going to change, officials in Washington and Sacramento pledge.

Osbourne said that after she was questioned by The Times about the issue, she brought the matter to the attention of fair-employment department director Dennis W. Hayashi. He directed her to devise a system for ensuring immigrant-related claims are properly handled, she said.

Meanwhile, a top aide to state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer has begun meeting with frustrated federal authorities over their concerns that immigrant rights have not been enforced in California.

“The bottom line is that federal-state cooperation is very important in fighting discrimination,” said senior state Assistant Atty. Gen. Louis Verdugo, who oversees civil rights enforcement. In the new administration under Lockyer and Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, “there’s a much stronger commitment to implementing” the partnership, he said.

Some officials blame former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson’s strident opposition to illegal immigration for a “hiatus” in state-federal cooperation.

But Sean Walsh, who was Wilson’s chief spokesman, said the former governor and his staff were careful to protect the rights of all legal immigrants in California.

“For legal immigrants, we absolutely held out the welcome mat,” Walsh said. “They’re the backbone of California.”

It is unclear how many cases of alleged discrimination may have fallen through the cracks in recent years because of the breakdown in communication between Washington and Sacramento.

What is clear, according to records, is that the Justice Department’s immigrant caseload has suffered a sharp decline, from a high of 761 cases in 1992 to just 325 last year. With the end of this fiscal year five weeks away, the office has logged 272 claims this year. Money collected from employers in back pay and civil penalties also dwindled dramatically last year, though it rebounded this year.

Immigrant-rights activists said they believe the declining federal caseload flies in the face of continued discrimination against many legal immigrant workers.

Survey Found Discrimination

The most frequently cited study on the problem, done in 1990 by the U.S. General Accounting Office, found that one in five employers surveyed had discriminated on the basis of citizenship or foreign characteristics. Los Angeles registered the nation’s highest rate of discrimination against workers who looked or sounded “foreign.”

Vibiana Andrade at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Los Angeles said the problem “certainly hasn’t diminished. People are just very reluctant to come forward and there’s less outreach being done” to let immigrant workers know about their rights.

“There’s obviously racism, and it gets ugly sometimes,” she said.

Employers grumble that they are caught in the middle, facing fines from the INS if they are too lax in ferreting out illegal residents and fines from the Justice Department if they question legal residents too aggressively.

“It’s a Catch-22,” said Barry Willoughby, an attorney for Townsend Culinary Inc.--the Maryland food processor fined $367,000 for discriminating against 660 noncitizens.

But Trasvina at the Justice Department says the law is clear on what employers can and can’t do. The trick, he said, comes in teaching the public that being an immigrant does not give an employer license “to ask you for your papers. . . . That’s just not right.”