Certifying a birth a mother's ordeal
U.S.-born girl waits to start school
By Zach Patberg • STAFF WRITER • August 17, 2008

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Pamela Lopez-Lopez, a wide-eyed 3-year-old with jet black pigtails and mouth-crowding cheeks, resists the draw of her mother's lap and plays with her hands while swimming in a conference-room chair. She doesn't say much around strangers. At her age, poise is still on a learning curve and attention is an appealing but intimidating prospect.

She is old enough, however, to start school this fall. But she needs to be born again first, this time on paper.

Though a U.S. citizen — delivered at Toms River's Community Medical Center — Pamela has no birth certificate, and so lacks the anchoring piece to her Americanization.

It's not as if her mother hasn't tried: In the past three years, Adrianna Lopez-Lopez has visited the Toms River Vital Statistics registrar 16 times, bringing fresh identity documentation on each $50 cab ride from her home in Lakewood.

During her first visit, within days of Pamela's birth, she presented a Mexican ID made at a "store near a cemetery." This was, of course, not valid. She was told she needed a passport. So she returned with one. She was told she needed proof of address. She came back with a photo debit card and a statement from a bank account she just opened. They were both rejected.

She brought a doctor's bill, a cell-phone bill, a Sprint invoice, immunization records, a consulate matricula card — all denied.

Bureaucratic maze

"I thought with the bank account they would definitely give it to me — that's where they told me to go — but always, "No,' " the 23-year-old single mother, who emigrated illegally from Mexico six years ago and now cleans houses, said last week, Pamela beside her. "After a while, seeing my face so many times, they wouldn't even look at what I brought."

Lopez-Lopez's ordeal, while extreme, is a common tale among undocumented mothers. After repeated tries to obtain birth certificates for their U.S.-born children, they often find themselves back where they started, if not a bit dazed from the bureaucratic entanglements and language hurdles.

For the child, it represents the first handicap inherited from a culture dependent on obscurity as the illegal-immigration dilemma swells on the national radar and forces the government to elasticize its infrastructure.

"We've got millions of people sandwiched in the middle of a twilight zone," said Moshe Zev Weisberg, head of the nonprofit Lakewood Community Service Corp., which deals heavily with the town's immigrants. "This is one aspect of that. And leaving them in the shadows is not helpful for anybody."

After Sept. 11, 2001, birth certificate restrictions tightened. In 2002, a governor's order requiring several layers of identification became a major hurdle for undocumented parents. By 2004, a list of ID alternatives was created to help unclog the system. Four years later, the problem persists.

Deep frustration

Nationwide, about 1.4 million U.S. citizens under age 6 have at least one undocumented parent, the Urban Institute reported in 2005. New Jersey has the fifth highest undocumented immigrant population in the country — about 373,000, according to the Institute. While other ethnicities face such birth certificate troubles, none in New Jersey is more susceptible than Hispanics, who in 2006 accounted for about 17 percent of all births in Ocean and Monmouth counties, latest available state numbers show. Of that, nearly a quarter came from Lakewood mothers, far exceeding any other town.

Rough estimates put Lakewood's undocumented numbers as high as 20,000, about 30 percent of the total population. Yet it is impossible to tell which are mothers of U.S.-born children and how many more have failed to get birth certificates, because hospitals and state officials don't track these figures. Still, interviews with Latino advocates and mothers across the region reveal an undercurrent of deep frustration at the process.

"It's been very hard; this is nothing new," Jackie Ramirez, a case manager with the Asbury Park-based advocacy group Hispanic Affairs. "We went to a workshop for clients about it, but to tell you the truth, it's still a problem and I don't know why."

Monica Guerrero said a social worker friend routinely sends her mothers who have been turned away repeatedly because of document confusion. Often she would have to go with parents from Manasquan, Asbury Park, Lakewood and Toms River to sort out the misunderstanding. And even when a certificate is finally issued, according to the local Latino activist, mistakes frequently force the parents to spend more time and money correcting them through the courts and appeals to Trenton.

The experiences have left Guerrero jaded.

"It's like the system doesn't want to help them get things right," she said. "There are so many complaints, and all the time, trouble. They don't like the fact the father or parents are undocumented and getting birth certificates."

Two stumbling blocks commonly cited involve language differences and inconsistencies between municipalities.

Few local registrars have bilingual employees, and many differ in what documentation they request, despite state law mandating a uniform list of acceptable forms of identification. New Jersey allows addressed bank statements as an alternative to a driver's license if paired with another proof of address, for example. Yet that option is not included on the list posted at the registrar office in Toms River's Town Hall.

Some offices vary in how long they will accept hospital discharge papers, from a month to a year after the baby is born. A number accept cell-phone bills, whiles others limit to home phone bills.

Language barrier

Rosa, a Mexican immigrant, claims she was given a certificate for her son in Brick with just a matricula card, which is considered unacceptable under the state guidelines. For her daughter, the 32-year-old mother, who declined to give her last name, said it took her two years to get a certificate, at which point she could finally enroll the child in school after missing a year.

Local vital statistics employees acknowledge the problem is a constant and that a certain level of "interpretation" exists between offices.

"The major problem is we don't have any Spanish-speaking workers here," Jessica Larney, a deputy registrar in Brick, said. "But we do as best we can trying to find them some form of ID to use."

She added: "All the regulations fall under the state, but to some extent it's left up to individual discretion on certain things. Some can be much stricter than others."

Margherita Kaplan, the registrar for New Brunswick who for 10 years has trained local registrars for the state, called the predicament a "Catch-22."

"It's a very difficult situation. I feel very bad for these people," she said while adding: "I do believe they should be going through the process and coming here legally."

One effort to ease the pain has been the Consulate-On-Wheels, a program started in April in which the Mexican consulate brings the passports directly to undocumented immigrants. It so far has spent weeks in Lakewood, Long Branch, Asbury Park, Red Bank and Trenton, serving 400 and 1,200 Mexicans daily.

"This is a problem throughout the whole (Monmouth) county," Cecilia Reynolds, publisher of the Spanish-language newspaper Nosotros and co-organizer of Consulate-On-Wheels, said of the birth certificate difficulties. "People will call the newspaper all the time saying, "My kid needs to go to school or we want to go to Mexico. Help us.' But there's so many of them."

Belated awareness

Still, politicians and state officials seem unaware.

"This is the first that the State Registrar has been made aware of this issue," Donna Leusner, spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Senior Services, which oversees birth certificate distribution, wrote in an e-mail. "As the State Registrar is made aware of discrepancies, they are addressed immediately."

The first complaint to reach Robert Singer, a state senator and Lakewood committeeman, was early last week when advocate Ada Gonzalez called his chief of staff, furious over how Toms River's Vital Statistics registrar had treated Pamela and Adrianna Lopez-Lopez.

"In Lakewood, the reason why there are no complaints may be because they have to deal with (undocumented immigrants) on a more regular basis, whereas Toms River may not be as accustomed to it," Singer said.

Gonzalez, Lakewood Community Services' bilingual services director and member of the Township's Human Services Advisory Board, said she accompanied Lopez-Lopez on her most recent registrar visit Monday. There, she presented the mother's stack of documents that included a Mexican passport and bank statement. When the deputy registrar still turned them away — suggesting this time that Lopez-Lopez get an ID from Motor Vehicles — Gonzalez became irate.

"They treat their dogs better," she later said.

Toms River's state registrar Cindy Farrell, who did not handle Gonzalez's encounter, said Wednesday that in general, "A lot of times they don't speak English, and we think they understand but maybe they don't when they leave. That's why we refer them to the state, and if it's approved, we give them a birth certificate."

Lopez-Lopez's next move is appealing directly to Trenton. On Thursday with Gonzalez, she dropped off her application and proofs of identification at Sen. Singer's office, which, according to Singer, will then forward them to the State Registrar on his letterhead.

Meanwhile, an important milestone for Pamela approaches: school. It will start with or without her.

"I have a caseworker that keeps asking me for a birth certificate so they can put her in Head Start," Lopez-Lopez said through a translator of the preschool tailored for poor and non-English-speaking children. "I tell her the situation and she says "Try any way you can.' "

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Zach Patberg: (732) 557-5739 or zpatberg@app.com

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