Illegal Immigrants Enter Twilight Zone as Teenagers

She was the classic inner-city overachiever. She steered clear of gangs and drugs and embraced high school honors classes.

She became class valedictorian, got a full scholarship to an Ivy League university and graduated a year early.

Then, just a few weeks before starting at a prestigious law school, her one-woman conquest of the world was abruptly halted.

She is an illegal immigrant--and therefore ineligible for federal financial aid. She watched in dismay as law classes began without her.

Immigration experts say hundreds of thousands of young immigrants in America--innocent bystanders brought as children by illegal immigrant parents--are coming of age in such legal limbo.

At least 200,000 young illegal immigrants have already reached the age--between 16 and 18--when their status starts to limit their ability to get a driver’s license, obtain federal education aid or get a good job, said Jeff Passel, an immigration expert at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C.

Each year, 50,000 to 100,000 illegal immigrants nationwide reach this age, he said. Unless immigration laws change, at least a million illegal immigrant children in the United States--the majority from Mexico--will find their lives severely stunted by their undocumented status, Passel said.

The impact is greatest in California, where a third of the about 6 million illegal immigrants--children and adults--are believed to reside, experts say.

“It’s a human tragedy,” said Harry Pachon of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute in Claremont. “They really are stateless people. Some of these kids are 4.0 students, and have skills to contribute to the economy.”

Los Angeles advocates traveled to Washington last week to lobby for Clinton administration immigration initiatives that, if approved by Congress, would help many of the youths--though not the Ivy League-educated daughter of immigrants from Colombia.

“This is like a state of psychological limbo,” said the student, who came to California as a child in 1987. Her parents could have become legal residents--had they known they qualified before it was too late to apply.

Many of these youths arrived in the late 1980s or early 1990s with immigrant parents from impoverished villages in Mexico or war-torn regions of Central America. They are the youngest members of an immigration boom that brought cheap labor that was welcomed by employers.

Some of the youths have temporary residence permits--but little hope of qualifying for permanent residency status, experts say. This status is given to those who qualify by marriage; those sponsored by family members; to employees filling specialized jobs; or to refugees or those given asylum status, a year after winning such a classification. Most would not even qualify for a proposed amnesty for immigrants who have lived in the United States since 1986 because they arrived too late.

Not all are Ivy League bound. But, as these young people come of age, they all face a crisis: They have all the expectations of U.S.-born children, but a fraction of the opportunities. They speak poor Spanish and have only the vaguest memories of the countries they left behind. For them, coming of age with dubious legal status is a headache, a heartache and a Kafkaesque legal labyrinth.

“So many of these kids are ashamed,” said Judy London, staff attorney for the Central American Resource Center, which helps immigrants attain legal status. “They feel like they’ve done something wrong.”

Being Haunted by the Past

Two soccer players for Los Angeles’ Galaxy team hit this wall recently. Tomas Serna and Jose Retiz, stars of their Santa Ana high school soccer team, turned out to be illegal immigrants. They were drummed out of the Galaxy last month. They could not be paid because they entered the country illegally and didn’t have the required documents.

“Having your past come back to haunt you is something that is only supposed to happen to politicians,” said James Smith, an immigration expert at Rand Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank. “This is something that happened when you’re 5 haunting you. Every time they succeed and achieve, their secret comes forth. It’s purgatory.”

Glenn Spencer, president of Voice of Citizens Together in Sherman Oaks, said that if Proposition 187 had been implemented--excluding young illegal immigrants from public schooling, hospitals and other services--these young people would not face this bottleneck because they never would have made it this far.

“The social and economic costs of illegal immigration have already been catastrophic to America,” Spencer said.

“Wouldn’t it be better if these bright people were back helping their country of origin? We don’t want to strip-mine every country of their best and brightest.”

Not all the children are from illegal immigrant families, experts say.

Matt Tallmer, spokesman for the American Immigration Lawyers Assn. in Washington, said many parents of the undocumented young people are legal residents who erroneously assumed their status automatically covered their children. Others are the adopted children of American-born parents who assume their citizenship automatically extends to their adopted children.

For most of these young immigrants, the clock is ticking. Their 18th and 21st birthdays are legal deadlines that, once passed, make it much harder for them to obtain legal status.

If they are caught with fraudulent documents or convicted of a felony, they lose their chance for legal status.

Before 1996, it was much easier to resolve such cases, experts say. Back then, a judge had discretionary authority to grant a green card, allowing people to work and remain permanently in the United States. This applied to any illegal immigrant who had been here for seven years and could demonstrate “good moral character” and extreme hardship, INS spokesman Dan Kane said.

Stiffer Standards Since 1996 Law

The 1996 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility Act brought stiffer standards. Children now must be able to prove that they have been here at least 10 years and demonstrate that their deportation would inflict “extraordinary and unusual” hardship on their parents, spouse or children.

The stricter rules left young people such as Tony Lara out in the cold.

Lara’s family fled the Salvadoran civil war when he was 10. Lara’s mother, like Cuban castaway Elian Gonzalez’s, died coming to the United States. He heard that she drowned while crossing the border, or more disturbingly, was murdered. His father was deported for dealing drugs, leaving Lara and his sister alone.

Lara’s sister was quickly adopted by an Irish immigrant and his family. Lara, then 12, was abandoned by a series of relatives. He ended up in a rat-infested storage garage with some friends. Somehow, he also became a state wrestling champion at El Camino High School.

“I used to hide it really well. Everybody thought I lived with my family,” Lara said. “I only told people who I really trusted.”

One of them was his coach, Terry Fischer. Fischer already knew several families who had taken in unaccompanied immigrant children. So he invited Lara to live with his family.

“He was such a good kid, and he had no place to go,” Fischer said. “We lose so many kids like this through the cracks, kids who don’t make it or get killed. I guess I can never run for president because I have an undocumented alien living with me.”

The Fischers tried to register Lara as a foster child or adopt him. They say authorities told them they were harboring an illegal immigrant and subject to a $200-a-day fine.

In January, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced private immigration bills to grant permanent resident status to Lara and to Guy Taylor, an orphaned Canadian who lives with his grandmother in Garden Grove.

There are 90 private immigration bills pending before Congress, including a bill to give Elian Gonzalez U.S. citizenship.

The efforts to deal with such cases have their roots in the Cold War, when the federal government permitted immigration from regimes hostile to the United States, such as Cuba and Nicaragua, but threw obstacles in the way of immigrants from friendly nations, such as El Salvador and Guatemala.

Now many immigrants, such as Rigoberto, 23, stand a good chance of legitimizing their status through the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, known as NACARA. Among other things, the act allows tens of thousands of Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum applicants who have been here since 1990 to apply for permanent residency. But applicants must make it through a thorny thicket of legal regulations to qualify--and many fall through the cracks.

Rigoberto--his middle name--began his senior year at UCLA in deportation proceedings. He said officials told him that because the war in El Salvador was over, his political asylum application had been turned down. Because his family brought him to California in 1988, he is applying for permanent residency under the relief act.

But his pending status makes him ineligible for federal education aid, so financing college has been a four-year struggle. He took semesters off to earn money to pay for the next semester. He took out bank loans.

“I could end up going to medical school or I might get deported,” he said. “It’s pretty much like being in limbo.”

Many young immigrants in the lurch will be able to formalize their status if Congress amends the relief act to give Haitians and other Central Americans benefits similar to those of Cubans and Nicaraguans.

Life Could Be Transformed

Supporters want to attach the parity amendment, along with the new amnesty, to legislation to increase the number of visas for high-tech workers--which is expected to come up in Congress sometime in the next few weeks.

Jaime, a Cal State Northridge student, is one of those whose life could be transformed if the legislation passes, and he was among the Los Angeles advocates who traveled to Washington last week to urge its passage.

A soft-spoken and articulate 22-year-old, Jaime came from El Salvador in 1991.

Now completing his junior year, he has already done paid research on AIDS and cancer at Northridge and UCLA. He wants to earn a doctorate in biochemistry.

But he arrived a year too late to apply for legal status on his own under the immigrant relief act and turned 21 before his mother was granted permanent residency. INS officials say his mother could still apply for a visa on his behalf--but that could take five or more years, and he would have to leave the country in the interim.

Now he’s here on a work permit tied to a pending asylum application. Experts familiar with his asylum claim believe it probably will be denied.

Since he can’t receive college loans and financial aid, Jaime works nearly full time to pay school fees of $1,000 a semester. A single chemistry book cost him $119.

Officials say there are many such stories out there. Los Angeles Community College District officials say that one reason more qualified low-income students don’t apply for financial aid is because some are illegal immigrants.

Experts say the scope of the problem will grow as more immigrants come to the United States.

“These kids face enormous psychological problems,” immigration expert Passel said. “It strikes me as very wasteful to have invested in kids who are ready, willing and able to make contributions to the larger society, and we won’t take them. American society is relegating them to a second-class, underground existence.”