http://www.longmontfyi.com/Local-Story.asp?id=6507

Publish Date: 3/5/2006

Legalize me
If they’ve entered undocumented since 2001, legalization is nearly impossible for immigrants

By Ben Ready
The Daily Times-Call

LONGMONT — He’s worked in the United States since 1973: for 16 years under the table, 14 years on the books and again illegally for the past three.

After Hidalgo del Parral, Mexico, where his wife and kids have always lived, Longmont is where 56-year-old Rafael Corral has called home for the past seven years.

He came here after slipping undetected across the border as a young man of 24, promised by a cousin that Longmont had good jobs that paid well.

When asked what he’s given America in 33 years and what he’s taken, Corral’s answer is the same: “My work.”

In slaughterhouses, construction sites, lawns and gardens, corporate bathrooms and fields of harvest in seven other states and dozens of Colorado cities, he’s worked without guilt, but often with the anxiety of being found and deported.

“I came to work, to look for a ‘peso’ better than in Mexico,” Corral said in Spanish from his rented room in Longmont. “But I can’t be at ease without papers. Never. Sure, they give me work, but I can’t live free and open.”


An estimated 11 million to 20 million illegal immigrants live in the United States, and Corral, like many, simply wants to stop living on the fringes of society and to have his 33-year presence in the country recognized by the law.

“I just want my papers again,” he said.

Through an amnesty program in the 1980s, Corral won a work visa requiring yearly renewal, but three years ago — because of his own forgetfulness, he admits — he let it expire.

Now Corral, who dropped out of school after the sixth grade and speaks and reads only rudimentary English, wants his work permit back. But on Jan. 10, the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services returned his application as “unacceptable.”

Even if he could understand the legalese, said Laurel Herndon, director of the Immigrant Legal Center of Boulder County, his chances of winning lawful recognition are slim.

“People who have had to renew something every year and haven’t done so have taken themselves out of the race,” said Herndon, who is not familiar with Corral’s case.

In fact, illegal immigrants living in the United States today have virtually no chance of “legalizing” unless they had a family member who also is a U.S. citizen file a petition for them before April 2001.

“Even then, there is a long waiting line, and family members are supposed to wait out of the country until they get to the front of the line,” Herndon said, adding that Mexican adults petitioned by a family member wait an average of 14 years to come to here legally.

“We welcome their arms to do our work, but we don’t acknowledge their humanity and their need to be treated as human beings,” Herndon said.


Outlaws or pawns?

According to some immigration-reform proponents, the faster that undocumented residents like Corral are deported, the faster American wages and standards of living will rise.

Anyone who comes to this country illegally, they say, undermines the nation’s authority to decide for itself what it “needs.”

“We Americans are so good and so nice, but we’re really getting taken advantage of,” immigration-reform activist Frosty Wooldridge said Monday night during a rally in Longmont. “If Mexicans are allowed to continue their lawless population of our state, you will see dire consequences in every quarter of Colorado.”

But immigrant advocates argue that illegal immigrants are the ones getting taken advantage of. They say America’s economy has long needed the cheap underground labor provided by undocumented workers, but the U.S. immigration system exploits them and denies them the dignity of lawful recognition.

“If they get work, it’s because the work is necessary. If the country didn’t need them, they’d never find work,” Longmont resident Graciela Bartlett said.

Bartlett, born in Mexico, waited 13 years to come to the United States after her mother-in-law supported her residency application. Six years later, she became a U.S. citizen.

Though she immigrated legally, Bartlett doesn’t fault people like the poor farmers with whom she grew up for risking it all for a better life.

“We know how they lived,” Bartlett said. “It’s not that you don’t want to work (in Mexico). There isn’t work. For campesinos, it rains or it doesn’t rain.”

Herndon believes American policymakers and business leaders are clearly exploiting undocumented workers.

“It’s a little frightening to see what this country did to the Chinese in the late 1800s and what it’s doing to Mexican people today,” she said.

The Chinese Exclusion Laws from 1882 to 1943 severely limited immigration from China after Chinese workers helped build the Transcontinental Railroad. Born of competition with American workers and widespread nativism, the laws also limited the rights of Chinese workers.

“Immigration laws today are causing millions of Mexican workers in the U.S., who are doing vital work, to take on the risks, all the exploitation, that should not exist in a democratic society,” Herndon said.


Enforcing the law?

Technically, Corral should not be working in the United States.

But he has a valid Colorado driver’s license and a valid U.S. Social Security card, so he has little trouble filling out I-9 work forms and finding jobs.

The Social Security Administration didn’t start issuing separate cards labeled “Not valid for employment purposes” until 1982; Corral’s older card has allowed him to land plenty of jobs.

In fact, the federal government knows he’s here and has tracked his earnings.

His rejected work permit application documents his earnings from 1974 to 2003 and lists tax contributions during that time — he has made as much as $14,100, in 2003. The document also shows six years with no income, years he said he was paid cash under the table.

Still, said Doug Smith, spokesman for the Denver regional office of the Social Security Administration, “the zero earnings don’t cause a red flag.”

“We’d think perhaps it’s a woman raising kids or federal worker paying into the civil service system,” he said.

That leaves the burden for determining the legitimacy of Corral’s Social Security card on employers. But even companies that try to adhere to immigration law find themselves fighting a contradictory bureaucracy.

“An employer can be charged with discrimination if they investigate documents further for some employees and not others,” Herndon said. “An employer who verifies (work authorization) numbers with Latinos but not with non-Latinos is likely violating the law.”

Smith said employers may use the Social Security Administration Web site to verify a worker’s Social Security number and eligibility, but only after they’ve hired someone. But if the numbers don’t check out, employers would be breaking the law if they fired that person immediately.

The reason, Smith said, is to protect workers from what “may be a clerical error.”

Essentially, Herndon said, the system is set up so employers willing to hire illegal workers to save money not only have a competitive advantage, but they also face few repercussions.

“An employer who wants to follow the rules is at a distinct disadvantage with competitors,” she said. “That employer who wants to do the right thing should be rewarded, not punished, and that’s what’s happening now.”


One lonely worke

Though he’s gone nearly a month without a drink, Corral admits he’s no saint and no stranger to the bottle.

Living alone so many years, he said, has often led him to take comfort in alcohol. And worse, Corral has racked up three DUIs in the United States.

Should he be denied legal status for that reason alone? “I don’t know,” he said.

He doesn’t think about systems or the latest decisions made by legislators in Denver or Washington, D.C. He makes about $2,000 a month in cash, gardening and mending fences and equipment on a small farm in Boulder County.

Corral admits he’s tired and getting more homesick by the year. He plans to work another five or so years in the United States then return home. And considering he’d make about $160 a month in Mexico, he said he can’t complain.

He pays $400 a month in rent and wires about $600 a month home to his sick older sister, his wife and his three children. He bought a $2,000 car last year, which he fixed up and points to proudly if you ask him about it.

Below the bare walls of his modest room sit a single bed and four plywood tables crowded with his possessions: bags of chips, eggs, canned food, a hotplate, a mini-refrigerator, a microwave and a small black-and-white television.

“I’m a poor man in this country, but I hope to live well in Mexico soon,” said Corral, who recently bought a plot of land in Parral for $5,000 and wants to build a barn and put some pigs and chickens in it.

“Papers would be nice,” he said, “but soon I’ll be back there, maybe for good. Here they say it isn’t my country, so ... I’m just here to work.”

Ben Ready can be reached at 303-684-5326, or by e-mail at bready@times-call.com.