Documenting Amnesty’s Appeal in the Land of Opportunity

Grape picker. Carwash sponge boy. Dishwasher. Bell hop. Car salesman. Accounting clerk.

Guillermo De Los Rios sits behind a desk in his East Los Angeles office, wearing a smart gold necktie and talking about the ladder he has climbed since coming up from Mexico in 1985.

Hard work and President Reagan made it possible, he tells me. Reagan’s 1986 amnesty program for undocumented workers gave him a chance to do a little more with his life, and he’s thrilled that President Bush is trying to follow Reagan’s lead.

“It changes the way you think about everything,” De Los Rios says. “When you’re legal, you have choices.”

Today, De Los Rios, 36, lives in a downtown apartment and drives a 1998 Mercury Grand Marquis to work, where he manages a $700,000 annual budget. He’s chief financial officer of One Stop Immigration, an L.A. name if ever there was one.

And having just passed a citizenship test, he says he’ll probably vote for President Bush’s reelection in three years.

So here we have this Eastside rhapsody for Republican leadership. Meanwhile, across the basin on the Westside, a group dedicated to an immigration slowdown is frantically trying to get Bush to come to his senses.

Ira Mehlman of the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform works the phone, fax and World Wide Web out of his home in Marina del Rey, trying to rally support for the cause.

Immigration is driving down wages and overwhelming public services, Mehlman tells me. Half the students in L.A. public schools don’t speak English, he says. And yet there’s no discussion of the impact a massive legalization drive will have in Southern California, where an estimated 1 million people, at least, are undocumented immigrants.

“What if there’s an economic downturn?” Mehlman asks. And what if a wink and a nod to undocumented immigrants encourages legions more to come to the U.S. illegally?

Fair questions. But an interesting thing is happening as Mehlman tries to rally the troops in a state that once voted down services for undocumented workers amid anti-immigration hysteria. He’s having trouble getting them worked into enough of a lather to petition the president or congressional representatives.

“People have other things going on in their lives,” he says. Many share his concerns, he finds, but they’re not passionate enough to get involved. Not the way they might have been when Pat Buchanan campaigned for national sheriff, urging true patriots to lock and load and ride to the border.

It may just be that in California, we’ve now reached the level of wealth at which every last one of us has hired an undocumented worker at one time or another.

Maybe it’s not them we’re legalizing.

It’s ourselves.

Actually legalization is a long way from a done deal. There’s haggling in Washington as to whether it ought to be full amnesty (a political longshot), a work program or a glorified hall pass of some type.

Bush had originally proposed amnesty for an estimated 3 million or 4 million Mexican immigrants, much to the horror of some in his own party. Now everyone’s working a political angle, so whatever they come up with, it’s a good bet all nationalities will be included.

However, it turns out, Guillermo De Los Rios isn’t the only one at One Stop Immigration who took notice that it was a Republican president, once again, who made something happen. The guy just down the hall from De Los Rios is another immigrant who caught a break under Reagan and made the most of it.

Mario Villa, 45, was selling pots and pans after coming to the U.S. in 1979. He hung around way after his visa told him to go home to Mexico, and now he’s executive director of One Stop.

“We’re all really excited,” Villa says, speaking for 19 employees and many of the 400 clients who come monthly to Whittier and Esperanza for all types of immigration services.

A reasonable person could argue that President Bush had one overriding motive in pushing legalization, and the word I’m looking for is not compassion but votes. More Latino votes in four years. But even if it’s true, there’s no cynicism among the brass at One Stop Immigration.

“I’d vote for him,” says Villa. “I can’t say that we’ve seen much from the Democrats.” De Los Rios, as mentioned, is in the bag too. And so is Antonio Sandoval, the citizenship coordinator.

I suggest to Villa that another Bush motive might be to exploit cheap labor on behalf of his buddies in agriculture, and he nods.

But if you’re legal, he says, you’ve got a much better chance of working your way out of the fields, breaking free of government handouts and making a bigger contribution to society. After amnesty in 1986, he and De Los Rios met as students at Glendale Community College, both of them using their new status to think grandly.

There’s a classroom next to Villa’s office at One Stop, and when I sneak in to have a look, teacher Julio Romero is asking his students a question about Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. Chalked on the blackboard are the names of elected officials, with President Bush at the top.

“Everyone’s saying, ‘Our dreams are coming true,’ ” Romero tells me before asking another question of his students.

“What do we call the national holiday on July 4?”

Erasmo Velasquez, 24, answers without hesitation.

“The day of independence.”

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Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.