Why Amnesty Failed

...So immigrants who don't want to walk straight into the INS can ready their paperwork instead at places like the Ethiopian Community Center or Hispanos Unidos de Virginia...

...Where there's need, there's greed...

...Others, they told me to come back another day, the secretary wasn't there...

...The legislation, which passed the House by seven slim votes, tread a narrow path between warring camps...

...Despite a spring, summer, and fall of TV and newspaper ads touting the program, Martinez, a 30-year-old native of El Salvador, waited until February to apply...

...Congress laid down the general rules and left the INS to write the fine print, which has been the subject of lawsuits ever since...

...They've appeared on radio shows, delivered green cards in hospital wards, and sent valentines to elderly applicants...

...Supporters of the Schumer extension argue that an extra year's time could coax forth another 400,000 people from the shadows of illegal life...

...One way to do that would have been to offer spouses and children a type of limbo status called "extended voluntary departure," a neither-here-northere arrangement that forestalls deportation proceedings...

...One of the most noteworthy efforts has been that of Harold Ezell, the western regional commissioner...

...The skeptic disinclined to believe the radio ads or tortilla bags might listen up if he sees his neighbor or brother-in-law walking around with a green-striped 1-688 work permit in his pocket...

...If I give them the names of my children," she says, "they'll take them ." As the year-long legalization program draws to a close, there are hundreds of thousands of Evas: illegal immigrants too poor, confused, or afraid to capitalize on its one-time offer...

...In private conversation, INS officials in field offices share that assessment...

...Let applicants pay it off gradually...

...Just who qualifies and how has been a matter of confusing and consistent change...

...Her problem might not be as bad as those of the friends and family she left behind in Mexico, but it's easier to address...

...citizens, since they were born here...

...Congress spent five years cussing over what finally passed in 1986 as the Simpson-Rodino act...

...Since applications, which list family members, are confidential, that doesn't mean children and spouses will be deported...

...The task "calls for much more than mass media approaches," it said, promising an additional "outreach effort" that ethnic groups say hardly materialized...

...It comes as no surprise that Martinez's fears are widely shared...

...For all that, Osmin Martinez had doubts— about nine months' worth of them...

...What keeps hundreds of thousands inside our own borders from stepping forward to fulfill the promise that brought them here in the first place...

...I just don't have the proof," said Ovel Salguedo, who says he came to the U.S...

...Though the INS guarantees confidentiality, it's no surprise that business men who have been cheating the government out of payroll and Social Security taxes run the opposite direction when asked to sign statements...

...What that might mean in the tangled instance of Eva, the Mexican woman in Chicago, is unclear...

...The problem is that no one is quite sure what "known to the government" means...

...A former executive at Wienerschnitzel International, Inc., a hot dog company, Ezell once made headlines with his prescription for illegal immigrants: "catch 'em, clean 'em, and fry 'em ." But the New Ezell has taken to donning sombreros at Hispanic boxing matches, and riding in the Chinese New Year parade...

...Instead of being thanked for an act of beneficence, we're hearing the whining of the ungrateful," said Patrick Burns of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, to The New York Times...

...Tack on from $500 to $1,000, or more, for those who retain an attorney...

...Later, with that beachhead established, the rest of the family follows...

...I didn't want to try to arrange it because they might arrest me," he said...

...The U.S...

...Work harder to convince employers they won't be penalized for signing affidavits...

...So were people who had left the country and returned on legal visas...

...In Chicago, only 12 percent of the 65,000 who applied by midJanuary had received word of the INS's final ruling...

...In addition, the agency deputized more than 900 church and community groups, awkwardly dubbed Qualified Designated Entities, to help illegals prepare their applications...

...But despite the government's flexibility, producing the proof is often the toughest task an applicant faces...

...The effort to extend the deadline is made even more difficult by the opposition of Sen...

...Osmin Martinez, a Salvadoran immigrant, has worked in six different restaurants since he arrived in Washington in 1979...

...Charles Schumer wants to buy more time and has asked Congress to extend the deadline for a year...

...When the program kicked off last May, immigration officials predicted that between 2 million and 3.9 million people would register...

...The campaign has consisted mostly of ads in newspapers and on radio and TV broadcasts, in as many as 36 different languages...

...Individual INS officers make their own judgments...

...It promised to get tough on new bordercrossers by fining employers who hire them...

...The Dallas Times Herald told the story of an Austin restaurant owner who responded to a request for documentation by throwing a roll of toilet paper at his former employee...

...Illegal immigrants, by nature, avoid paper trails...

...Too many potential applicants still have a wait-and-see attitude...

...He said that his efforts to get written proof cost him more than two weeks of lost work time...

...Rep...

...They don't want Immigration to know where they are," said Mary Mercado, director of the Spanish Catholic Center in Washington...

...20510...

...Illegal aliens are afraid to report crimes or fires...

...Yeah, yeah, and the ozone layer's leaking too, you say—so what...

...But it does mean there are no guarantees of protection should the INS find them...

...Although he made a trip back to Chicago to collect rent receipts and contact former employers, he has yet to receive all the paper they promised to send...

...A survey in Los Angeles found that 30 percent of those who attended an amnesty information program said they failed to file applications due to fears about ineligible family members...

...These delays have kept the good news from filtering back into the community...

...Charles Montgomery provided research for this article...

...What if only the wife qualified...

...For applicants who have moved, the need to gather documents may require long, expensive trips...

...They've even begun placing flyers in the bags of tortillas sold in grocery stores, urging people to apply...

...The agency has considerable discretionary powers that it could use to soothe immigrant fears...

...As its word-spreaders, the Immigration and Naturalization Service chose The Justice Group, a consortium of three California public relations firms that bid $10.7 million to do the job...

...At the same time, it promised to ease up on those who arrived before 1982 by offering legal status...

...Still, it isn't free...

...By definition, the immigrants eligible for this program had spent at least five years hiding from the INS...

...The documentation problem is a bit tougher but still solvable...

...Faced with potential fines, her employer asked to see her work permit...

...I thought it was like it would wreck the restaurant to get papers...

...An off-duty Miami cop was charging up to $1,200 for Cuban and Haitian couples...

...Processing: Probably the best advertisement the INS could post would be hordes of successful alumni...

...The kind of campaign that should have started a year ago finally seems to be working...

...Some field directors promised leniency...

...It's not just a humanitarian move on behalf of an easily exploited population, they say, but one essential to a healthy democracy...

...Attorneys for the illegal aliens argue it means any government agency—the Social Security Administration, say, or the Internal Revenue Service...

...Now they were being asked to stroll forward into the enemy's lair and commit name, address, and phone number to paper...

...For those who lack the money, defer the application fee...

...The yearlong deadline was arbitrary in the first place...

...She lacks the hundreds of dollars it would cost her to apply...

...Instead, the agency fed the applicants' fears for six months by sending out contradictory signals...

...The INS circulated the proposed regulations in January 1987, even before they were published in the Federal Register, to allow extra time for review and challenge...

...Congress should simply accept that immigrant fears ran deeper and the government program ran slower than we all hoped and give it some more time...

...That loosening could be accompanied by higher penalties for fraud...

...The persistence of a vulnerable subclass hurts us all...

...Witnesses move, neighbors move...

...residence...

...And with approval rates of about 97 percent, there was a lot of good news to spread...

...Or spreading lots of words, not just in Spanish but in Creole, Polish, Tagalog, Urdu, Chinese and dozens of other languages...

...They don't believe [the program] is true...

...For those worried about their family members, that's easy: promise not to deport them...

...Would it deport the husband...

...from El Salvador in 1980...

...What, in fact, is the problem...

...Shortly after arriving, Salguedo began washing dishes in a Greek restaurant, where his brother had been working since the previous year...

...Similarly, when the archdiocese of Chicago held an information day, 500 people showed up...

...You know the retort: We gave them their chance...

...The children...

...by the Dallas Times Herald listed documentation problems as the most common reason that eligible immigrants don't apply...

...The INS, divvying up the estimated cost of more than 100 new offices and thousands of new employees, charges $185 per person, up to a maximum of $420 a family...

...In some of them, they said we don't have anything," he said...

...The Archdiocese of New York is distributing flyers in parochial schools and printing notices in church bulletins...

...Family Unity: Illegal immigration typically occurs in stages...

...The four regional processing centers have turned into bottlenecks, with computer problems and lost files slowing decisions to a trickle...

...Though he neither traveled beyond Washington nor hired a lawyer, Martinez estimates that with lost wages his application cost about $1,500...

...Money: For the Mexicans, Salvadorans, Poles, Filipinos, Sierra Leoneans, Jamaicans and countless others fleeing the repression or poverty of their homelands, the offer of U.S...

...But judged by the contentiousness that accompanied the original act, that may be a hard sell...

...The employer sanctions that accompanied the amnesty bill have already made Eva's life tougher...

...Congress should have offered more explicit protections to immediate family members and has turned down subsequent legislation that would have done so...

...has always recognized family unity as a key provision in immigration law, and we endorse it in international forums like the Helsinki accords...

...A number of immigrants have found their employers reluctant to acknowledge their past labors...

...What many don't know is who qualifies, or how to apply, or whom to trust...

...And she lacks the faith that immigration authorities won't deport her children, who didn't begin arriving from Mexico until 1984, two years after the amnesty cut-off date...

...To spur a last-minute surge, sombrero-topped immigration officials have been Texas two-stepping from one photo op to another, broadcasting Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Next, fix what's gone wrong...

...Many of them are former students, who entered the U.S...

...Immigrants with children in foster care couldn't be sure...

...They can prove it in lots of ways: with utility receipts, letters to a U.S...

...address, tax returns, union cards, driver's licenses, report cards, or sworn statements from priests, employers, or neighbors...

...if they haven't registered by now, that's their problem...

...Husband or wife arrives first, finds a job and home...

...citizenship may be a hell of a good deal...

...But the INS is also to blame...

...Congress required the program to pay for itself...

...In August, investigators who raided the El Norte Company of El Paso found it had done no work at all on most of its 1,500 cases...

...The INS, on the other hand, argues "known to the government" means known to the INS...

...There are no codified standards of how much proof must be offered...

...We have a lot of cases that have come from California," said Gilbert Jezbera, a legalization worker for the diocese of El Paso...

...Regulations: When the amnesty program began, applicants convicted of drunk driving in Texas were considered ineligible...

...The 107 INS offices sought a quick turnaround, but some of the original applications took more than six months to process...

...Many were paid in cash, or at rates below the minimum wage...

...And send a copy to Senator Alan Simpson, 260 Dirksen Bldg., Washington, D.C...

...For those details to spread, the campaign needed to take a more grassroots approach, utilizing church bulletins, hotlines, newsletters, and networks of ethnic groups...

...Workers who've been paid in cash may themselves hesitate to come forward since the law requires that they pay back taxes...

...But the amnesty law, which requires each member of a family to qualify on his or her own, is silent on the question of spouses and children...

...But their children, Eva's grandchildren, are already U.S...

...There's been a lack of trustworthy information," said Hernando Caicedo of the Mission San Juan, a Washington group that helps illegal aliens apply...

...Write your congressman today...

...The Los Angeles Times found travel agents in Polish neighborhoods of Chicago who charged $500 simply to fill out the four-page application...

...Keep the sombreroed INS officials out there holding burrito bakes...

...People are afraid to come forward because of what might happen to their children ." ?Documentation: To qualify for amnesty, an illegal alien must be able to prove that he or she has lived in the U.S...

...With several million potential clients, instant amnesty offices have sprouted across the country, in such unlikely locations as the back rooms of shoe stores, groceries, and travel agencies...

...continually since 1982...

...The INS said it would take up those questions on a case-by-case basis, using its discretion where unspecified "compelling humanitarian factors" warrant it...

...Without one, she lost her job last fall...

...others said they were awaiting word from Washington...

...It's getting good reviews, but too late to create the kind of awareness originally desired...

...Those who dropped out without leaving the country or securing a new visa became illegal aliens...

...Immigration officials like to down-play it, arguing that it affects few families...

...Perversely, it is the immigrants who are exploited the worst—agricultural workers and maids—who often have the toughest time getting former employers to own up...

...He moved to Texas in 1986...

...But by almost all accounts, the publicity has failed...

...It's hard to get proof.'' Nearly half of the immigration lawyers and amnesty workers who answered a nationwide poll...

...Though most illegal immigrants work, the costs can still be prohibitive...

...Felipe, a 35-year-old machinist, settled in Chicago when he first arrived from Mexico in 1978...

...Liberalize the burden of proof—requiring, say, a document per year, rather than one every three or six months...

...In January, The Justice Group launched a campaign that more closely resembles the grassroots efforts of private groups...

...Catholic Conference...

...Since she arrived in 1980 before the cutoff, she is eligible for amnesty...

...Tack on $50 to $100 per person for an AIDS test...

...A federal district court in Dallas last fall ruled the INS interpretation too narrow...

...It's an unbelievably big problem," said Munoz, the Chicago amnesty worker...

...Most of all, continue to hit the streets with sound trucks, church flyers, and door knockers...

...Here's the paper you wanted," he said...

...And since the INS is typically the last place an illegal immigrant will spread the news of an invalid visa, that eliminates a lot of applications...

...They're afraid to seek treatment for diseases...

...By contrast, in an admirable act of corporate responsibility, Levi Strauss loans up to $1,000 to employees wishing to apply for amnesty...

...They deserve some praise for the general tone of their approach," said Charles Kamasaki of La Raza, a national Hispanic lobby...

...11' Fear: From the start, INS officials faced a formidable challenge: to transform their image, Houdini-like, from a bureaucracy of feared cops to one of helpful paper pushers at neighborhood amnesty offices...

...First thing to do is extend the deadline to apply...

...But the wrangling inside the INS bureaucracy and in the courts is still going on...

...What's there to lose...

...And they rightly point out that no family members have yet been deported...

...on a visa valid for as long as they remained enrolled in school...

...They're self-selecting out ." A particularly important debate focuses on the phrase "known to the government" At stake are the applications of tens of thousands of immigrants...

...That shows that there are a lot of people out there who still haven't gotten the word," said Cecilia Munoz, who heads the diocese's amnesty efforts...

...Ironically, that was the conclusion of The Justice Group itself in its original proposal...

...To pick up the slack, a smorgasbord of ethnic groups, churches, local governments and other groups have attempted their own publicity campaigns...

...But as March began only a million had come forward, and head-counters have consistently deflated their final prediction, which has now sagged to only 1.35 million...

...A lot of people are confused," said Mary McClymont of the U.S...

...Furthermore, Congress declared all the information in amnesty applications confidential, forbidding the INS from using it for deportation purposes...

...lack on another $75 or so for applicants going through a neighborhood QDE...

...A better world gets built a step at a time...

...Individually, some INS field personnel have taken on their own energetic campaigns...

...So is the child she brought with her as a month-old baby...

...But they are eligible for amnesty only if their legal breach became known to the government...

...To soothe the fears, the INS opened 107 new offices that only process applications for amnesty...

...In October, the INS finally promised not to deport children younger than 18, but only if both parents qualified for amnesty...

...Agricultural workers get 18 months...

...Alan Simpson, the act's cosponsor and a pivotal immigration player...

...special classes of Haitians and Cubans get two years...

...Volunteers in a city-run service program are canvassing ethnic neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, posting notices in laundromats and grocery stores and broadcasting with sound trucks...

...Here's the answer: ?Publicity: The first key to a successful legalization program is spreading the word...

...But all the salsa in San Diego won't coax forth the number of illegals the law was intended to help...

...Not to mention time away from work or the cost of cross-country Greyhound trips in search of fiveyearold rent receipts...

...The new immigration law that took effect last May gives her the chance to shed that illegal status for a work permit and eventual citizenship...

...Juan Salguedo, who kept his pay stubs, applied for amnesty and received a temporary work permit in June...

...Family unity is perhaps the most bitterly contested aspect of the legalization program...

...Her other children, who joined her in 1984 and 1985, are not eligible...

...The INS has followed that rule and, by most accounts, made a good-faith effort to don the sheep's clothing...

...A lot travels by word of mouth...

...But volunteers on the front lines say it's the psychology that counts, with applicants unwilling to risk exposing husbands, wives, or children...

...Spanish jingles and attending burrito bakes...

...While a failing amnesty program may not rank at the top of the world's ills, unlike many others, it's one we can fix...

...They even split an 18-foot burrito with undocumented farm workers...

...After a sweep of the city's Dominicandominated Washington Heights, applications in nearby immigration offices doubled...

...As a result, virtually all illegal immigrants know an amnesty program exists...

...this keeps applicants from having to deal with the same agents who may have been trying to deport them...

...Across the globe, from Krakow to Krakatowa, the victims of poverty and oppression, numbering hundreds of millions, long to live in the U.S...

...But Eva lacks the paper trail she needs to prove her history of U.S...

...But Ovel, who didn't keep his papers, is still searching for the owner of the restaurant, which closed in 1983...

...But that decision applies to the Dallas district only, and similar suits are pending throughout the country...

...A California woman even submitted a winning receipt from a Las Vegas slot machine...

...Seriously inadequate...a major program deficiency," is what Doris Meissner, a former INS acting commissioner, called it in a report with Demetrios Papademetriou for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...

...I don't think anybody thinks the INS effort has been enough," said Elizabeth Bogen, who directs the Office of Immigrant Affairs for the City of New York...

...They know there's a program, but they don't know they qualify...