New hope for the immigrants in limbo Wednesday, July 25, 2001

By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

YAKIMA -- Working long, arduous hours six or seven days a week, Ramon picks cherries, pears and apples for little pay and no benefits.

He envies his brother Javier, who in 1986 embraced the government's offer of amnesty for undocumented immigrants. Ramon chose not to, thinking that eventually he would return home to Mexico to start a business.

But Ramon stayed, and today is excited that he may finally achieve what his brother has: permanent, legal U.S. residency. His reason for hope is a plan being considered by the Bush administration to grant legal status to at least some of the estimated 3 million Mexican immigrants living in this country illegally.

Groping for the right words in the English he is attending school to learn, Ramon said of Javier: "It's better for him, not for me. He works five days a week. Some days I pick cherries seven days a week.

"And my brother, every year, he has vacation, one week or two weeks. Not me. I work sometimes 10, sometimes 12 hours a day. And my brother, eight hours a day, Monday through Friday."

Today, as an undocumented worker from the rural state of Michoacan, Ramon finds himself at the bottom of the labor pool. His brother lives in Los Angeles, where he works in the chemical industry.

"There are no opportunities for me now," said Ramon, 39.

Although hazy on details, administration officials said this week that some illegal Mexican immigrants eventually might be able to meet eligibility requirements based on job histories and length of U.S. residency.

President Bush opposes, however, the type of broad amnesty that allowed 3 million undocumented immigrants of all nationalities to become legal in 1986.

"Everybody would like to live in the United States because in Mexico it's too hard to live with a family," said Luis, 40, a Yakima Valley farm worker who has lived in the United States illegally for 10 years. He was part of a crew of 12 men -- all undocumented -- who were picking cucumbers in the Wapato area recently.

Some Latino community leaders are afraid illegal immigrants will get their hopes up too high, too soon. Political hurdles loom before any kind of legal-residency legislation is enacted.

"The people want amnesty now. They don't want to wait five years," said Hector Franco, a former banker who does financial and immigration consulting in Yakima's Latino community.

"They want it faster than the politicians want to give it to them. They don't care about the details.

"People have a great sense of urgency. They live in limbo, they can't plan, they don't know where they're going to be living; they're living out of a suitcase."

The Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated in 1996 that Washington state had 52,000 illegal immigrants, and that the number was growing by 3,000 a year. Latino leaders, however, think the estimate is low, not to mention badly out of date, and even INS officials doubt its accuracy.

Even if the government's 1996 estimate was accurate, it would amount to 12 percent of the state's 2000 Latino population of 441,509, Washington's largest minority.

Most Washingtonians associate undocumented Mexican workers with the Yakima Valley, where illegals are a staple of the agricultural labor pool and the local economy.

But undocumented workers also fill the lowest economic rungs of the construction, restaurant, hotel, lawn maintenance, fishing and other industries in the Puget Sound area. King County has the state's largest Latino population.

"Latinos have taken over the construction industry here," said J-------M------ ( my edit)a former illegal immigrant, now a U.S. citizen and a Seattle-area organizer for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. He thinks a majority of the region's construction workers are undocumented.

M------ works with illegal immigrants and tries to persuade many of those in the building trades to join the union because "in the construction industry, a lot of the undocumented workers really are being abused. ... But a lot of them don't want to be affiliated with a union because of their (illegal) status."
Ramon, the undocumented farm worker, picks crops, works as a janitor and does handyman jobs around Yakima. Money is deducted from his paychecks for Social Security, although he can never obtain benefits. He has seen how some employers cheat workers who don't dare to complain, and he worries about the immigration authorities and deportation.

Legal residency, Ramon said, would provide "more opportunity for me and for my children."

Like the families of many undocumented workers, Ramon's has mixed legal status.

He and his wife are illegal. Both of his brothers but only one of his five sisters, all of whom live in California, are legal residents. Javier is helping their parents, who are retired, prepare papers to become legal.

The youngest two of Ramon's three daughters, 17, 12 and 7, are American citizens because they were born in the United States. But his oldest daughter, Nereyda, who graduated from high school in Yakima, was born in Mexico and is undocumented. She wants to go to college but can't.

"The cost of college is too high," Ramon said.

Being undocumented, she can't obtain a scholarship or a student loan. So she moved to Los Angeles to live with her mother, who does piecemeal work in a garment factory while Nereyda looks after the younger daughters.

Living in a legal twilight is traumatic, said M-----, the carpenters union organizer, who grew up in Quincy as the son of undocumented, migrant farm workers from Guatemala.

He was deported with his family when he was 8 months old, but they soon slipped back into the United States.

"I remember having to hide when I was a kid," M------ said. In first or second grade, "I would come home and my parents would be maybe 20 or 30 minutes late, and I would cry until they got home because I was afraid they had been deported."

M------ said a lot of Latino kids "want to go to school and get out of poverty, but it's hard for them to go to school because they are undocumented and they can't get federal or state grants.

"You can imagine how these kids are damaged emotionally, and how they become gangbangers because they feel society has let them down."

Talk of a legal residency program -- what the Bush administration calls "regularization" -- excites not only undocumented Mexicans but a broad segment of the Latino community because many have friends or relatives who are or were here illegally.

Franco, the Yakima financial consultant, said: "Even though I was born here (in Texas), my dad was an immigrant. So all of us, even though it doesn't affect us directly, empathize with (undocumented immigrants)."

But many are skeptical of talk of a guest worker program allowing Mexicans to work in the United States temporarily. Many had fathers or grandfathers who said they were exploited in the bracero program that brought temporary Mexican farm workers to the United States during World War II.

Conferring legal status, Franco said, wouldn't be amnesty in the sense of forgiveness but merely legalization -- and an acknowledgement of the reality of an underground work force that is an integral part of the economy.

"A lot of the people who went through the amnesty in 1986 are still here -- buying homes, establishing businesses," said Francisco Segura, a teacher and Latino community activist in Pasco, the largest Washington city with a Latino majority.

"Why have a large population with a status of illegal aliens? The American dream -- that's what people want."



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