Tax break: Cash for citizenship?

While the rest of us were groaning about filing our income taxes last week, in Chinatown they were lining up to pay them.

Among the poorest people in America, these wary but would-be citizens of lower Manhattan were grasping at any and every opportunity to get into the system without being snared by it. This strategy isn’t new among illegal immigrants: Pay federal income taxes in hopes of laying a paper trail that might lead to citizenship.

It’s just that this year there are so many more trying it, thanks to a proposal floated by the White House that has managed to trickle down to the crowded streets of Chinatown as the answer to a dream.

When President Bush announced a new guest worker program at the beginning of the year, the most vulnerable immigrant groups quickly took it as a signal to start paying taxes. The fate of the Bush proposal in Washington is characteristically uncertain this election year, but that wasn’t evident to the men waiting for a turn at the Zhen Zhong Accounting firm on Bowery Street in Chinatown.

“There’s just been a dramatic increase in people with no status coming in trying to pay,” says Rosanna Lau, Zhen Zhong’s owner. Apparently, they think the Bush proposal means amnesty could be on the way.

Lau employs her daughter, brother, sister, a cousin and about a dozen young women clericals to file returns. Everyone is required to speak English, Mandarin and the local dialect of Fuzhou, the capital of the Fujian province on the southeast coast of China. For two decades, villages all over that province have been emptied of their young as tens of thousands made the punishing journey to New York -- becoming the latest wave of immigrants from the East.

They come with nothing, borrowing thousands of dollars to pay “snakehead” smugglers to get them here by cargo boat only to spend their first years working off loans at the worst kitchen, factory and construction jobs America has to offer. In many ways, their lives in the tenements where East Broadway runs under the Manhattan Bridge are no different from those of the hopefuls who furtively cross the border from Mexico. It’s just that the Chinese come so much farther.

Lau understands their underground struggles because her father made a similar journey by boat in 1963. She came a decade later by plane with a green card in her pocket because he sponsored her. “My father reminds me all the time how much easier I had it,” says the 49-year-old accountant.

She thought about that a lot this busy tax season as, day after day, men like her father reluctantly came in for help to file for the first time. They came with no identity cards except maybe Chinese passports. There were no bank accounts, no payroll stubs, nothing but a mailing address to document their existence in America.

The lucky ones earned as much as $1,000 a week, but the work seldom was steady and they accumulated no more than a few thousand dollars in a year. This spring many scraped together extra cash to pay taxes. The government, which is happy to take the money, no questions asked, doesn’t require people who earn less than $7,800 annually to pay federal, state or city taxes, just Social Security.

Some of Lau’s new clients tried to pay with fistfuls of cash, and were sent to the bank across the street for money orders. One man last week simply gave Lau an unopened envelope from Citibank as proof of his identity. It turned out to be his PIN number. The accountant, exhausted from long nights slogging toward the April 15 deadline for her 8,000 working-class clients, peered through her wire-rim glasses before muttering something in Chinese.

The immigrants trust their Fuzhou accountants -- there are about a dozen in Chinatown -- to guide them through the first steps out of their secretive existence. Many who turned up in Lau’s office wanted reassurance that their money would buy them a piece of their dream to become legal.

“Is it true? Is it true? We can be citizens?” they would ask.

“You’re putting your money at risk if you think it’s going to help,” she informed them.

If Bush doesn’t come through, they wanted to know, could they get back their, say, $450?

“No, no,” she told them. “No way.”

Bush’s proposal, in fact, doesn’t promise citizenship. It allows the undocumented to receive working papers for three years and then requires them to go home. But the word has spread as far as China that this president, like his father and Ronald Reagan before him, may come through with some kind of immigration reform or amnesty program and the workers should be ready to make their case.

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Suspicious times

Waiting behind a glass partition in the ordinary offices of Zhen Zhong, a man in a thin cotton jacket, socks and sandals plucks a ticket number from a red-metal dispenser, the kind they use at uptown delis. When it is his turn, he tells Lau he is there to apply for an Individual Tax Identity Number, or ITIN, for his brother, who is illegally in America working in the kitchen of a Chinese buffet restaurant down South.

The ITIN allows people without Social Security numbers to file a return. The man does not speak English, but when I ask if he would talk to me, he answers before Lau can translate the question: “No. I don’t talk to American lady taking notes.”

In New York, these days, there is reason to worry about strangers asking questions. Since Sept. 11, the hunt for terrorists that has prompted government agencies to share information in unprecedented ways has increased the risks for illegal immigrants. Even the state motor vehicles department is for the first time cross-checking Social Security numbers it has on file with ones at the federal Social Security Administration.

This is a big problem for an estimated 100,000 drivers, many of whom are assumed to be illegal immigrants apparently operating with false Social Security cards. In the past, the IRS and immigration officials did not trade data, providing a loophole for the new Americans to get into the system. But May Chen, director of a local union that represents many garment workers in Chinatown, is concerned that the new era of cooperation will imperil the most vulnerable workers -- people like these, working for Chinese employers who house them over their restaurants and keep them in the shadows.

“Not only are the illegal people in the underground economy and subject to underground exploitation, they’re also the most susceptible to the underground rumor mill,” she said. Like many Democrats and labor leaders, she is skeptical of Bush’s plan because it fails to guarantee citizenship. Yet she is sanguine about its effect -- the rush to file: “If this Bush thing at least gets workers to do something legit, well, in the long run there are benefits in this country to paying taxes. I just hope some day these people get to use them.”

On Friday, the day after the deadline, Rosanna Lau gave a few people at Zhen Zhong the day off. The red metal dispenser had no more paper numbers, the plastic candy bin was empty. But the rush on this accounting office had nothing in common with the frantic, dog-ate-my-homework, last-minute filing that many of us know well.

This rush was unique: people eager to pay, people practically begging to pay. Because in Chinatown, they know what we’ve forgotten: that paying taxes isn’t just a burden.