New Hope on Immigrant Amnesty

When Gloria Alcantar came to the United States 22 years ago, she imagined the golden opportunities she had seen in the movies. Instead, trapped in a legal battle over a 15-year-old immigration law, she feels she never got a fair chance.

Like hundreds of thousands of immigrants in a decades-long legal dispute over the 1986 immigration amnesty law, Alcantar says she could have earned more money, secured health insurance and visited family in Mexico--if only she’d been granted a green card.

“I would have been a different person,” said the Ventura resident, who just had surgery for lung cancer at age 40.

“I could have developed myself as a person. I could have a future. Now I just hope there is a way I can get residency. It would still help.”

Alcantar is one of the thousands of plaintiffs in three lawsuits filed after they were disqualified from applying for amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The INS rejected Alcantar’s application because she indicated she had left the country for a month to celebrate Christmas with her parents in their native state of Guanajuato.

Now, after years of murky legal maneuvering, a Feb. 15 court ruling raises hope for her and others who contend that brief absences from the U.S. should not have disqualified them for amnesty.

“This ruling opens the door for these people,” said the leading plaintiffs’ attorney in one of the class-action lawsuits, Peter A. Schey of the Los Angeles-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s rejection of certain applications, he added, “changed people’s lives dramatically. Tons of people lost jobs. Children could not attend college. People were detained unnecessarily. People could not visit their families in times of illness and death. Most of all, they were deprived of the opportunity to become American citizens. It caused untold suffering over the years.”

The immigration act resulted from a debate over how to treat millions of workers who had contributed to the national economy for decades but were in the country illegally. Those granted amnesty gained legal residency and the ability to apply for citizenship.

Undocumented immigrants had to show they had lived continuously in the U.S. and had left for only “brief periods.” The suit, originally filed in 1986, challenged INS implementation of the law. It disqualified anyone who had left the country without INS permission.

The Feb. 15 ruling, by U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton, also allows others to join the class action if they can show their amnesty application was rejected because they left the country briefly.

Critics say undocumented immigrants should not be given another chance at amnesty, especially those repeatedly entering the U.S. without documentation.

Schey, in a motion filed Thursday, asked the court to approve a publicity campaign to increase the number of class-action participants, to set an 18-month application deadline and to order the INS to process the applications within six months. A hearing is scheduled April 1 in Sacramento.

Alvaro Ramirez Hernandez, 43, of Orange said he has been haunted by the INS rejection of more than a decade ago. He had hoped a green card would help him get him a better job. Using a fake Social Security card for nearly 20 years, he has earned no Social Security benefits. His salary as a cook is $8 an hour.

Until the mid-1990s, when enforcement of the U.S. border became stricter, he would travel to Mexico to visit his wife and two children, who didn’t want to live in the United States.

“If I had a green card, I would have tried to bring them here, not with a coyote [immigrant smuggler] but the right way,” said Ramirez Hernandez. “If had a green card, I would visit them. Right now, I can’t. This has kept my family divided.”

Ramirez Hernandez is now seeking residency under the Legal Immigration and Family Equity Act Amendments of 2000, known as the LIFE Act, which set up an alternative program for plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits to seeking residency.

Maria Fernandez Hernandez, 35, of Santa Ana was not a party to the lawsuit but hopes the latest court ruling will allow her to join it. In the late 1980s, while attending high school in Santa Ana, she returned to Mexico for several months when her grandmother died. She and her mother returned to the United States, only to learn they had missed the amnesty deadline. Her mother has since died.

Fernandez Hernandez tried to attend college but could not afford the out-of-state tuition assessed students without proper immigration documents. She now works two jobs, in a restaurant and as an attendant to an older woman, earning about $7 an hour and $440 a week.

“There are rules and we have to follow them, but sometimes you wonder why the rules could not be developed so that someone like me is not left behind,” Fernandez Hernandez said.

Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposed the 1986 amnesty legislation, does not think undocumented immigrants who failed to meet INS guidelines in 1986 deserve a second chance.

“The rules laid down by Congress were clear,” Mehlman said. “They did say you had to have continuous presence in the United States. There is no God-given right to break the law and get amnesty. It’s not so bad that someone went to celebrate Christmas in Mexico. It’s that they came into the country illegally again. Even if you came in with a tourist card, you are not eligible to live in the United States.”

Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA.com, which seeks to reduce immigration levels, agreed.

“The 1986 amnesty was an incredible and unprecedented gift to about 3 million immigration lawbreakers,” Beck said. “It was not an entitlement or some kind of human right. If some lawbreakers failed to get in on the spoils, we as a nation have no reason to be concerned.”

Virginia Kice, an INS spokeswoman, said the law’s larger purpose has been lost in the debate. “The whole debate got to be, when has someone abandoned their illegal residence, when they did leave and for how long,” she said.

Alcantar, who came to the United States from Guanajuato state to visit a sweetheart from her village, married at 18 and made the U.S. her home, even though she left to celebrate Christmas.

And when her husband abused her physically and verbally, she said, she had no choice but to stay in the United States. She had no financial support in Mexico. In the United States, she could get only low-paying jobs. Meanwhile, her husband threatened to turn her in to the INS if she complained.

When she tried to apply for amnesty in 1986, she was denied because she had visited family in Guanajuato. Still undocumented, she endured years of domestic abuse because she feared being turned over to authorities.

In 1999, through a new law that protects immigrant victims of domestic violence, she got a work permit that expires in August.

She said she might have developed a real career instead of earning less than $5 an hour cleaning a restaurant.

Three years ago, she developed cancer in a leg. Recently, she was diagnosed with a tumor in her lung. Again, she is relying on the man who abused her for health insurance after she was rejected for it because she used a false Social Security number before being given the work permit. A live-in boyfriend helps with other expenses because she can’t work.

“All these years, so much hinged on the card,” she said. “Time passed, and I was never able to get a good job or have the real liberties that the United States has to offer.”