22,000 aliens in Nevada face deportation

Martin Kuz

Tuesday, Nov. 9, 1999 | 11:34 a.m.

Angel Garcia finds himself ensnared in the sticky web of immigration law. The native Mexican does not grasp every last political intricacy of his predicament. Garcia only knows that, like hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who once held legal status in the United States, he faces deportation at any time.

"The things that happened to us need to be fixed," Garcia said through an interpreter. "We've been here for so long, I feel like we are being ignored."

Garcia is among 22,000 illegal aliens in Nevada and 350,000 nationwide who saw their temporary work permits annulled by a federal appeals court ruling last fall. The decision left that segment of nonresident immigrants, who worked legally in the United States for more than a decade and who now live here in violation of U.S. law, at risk of being sent back.

Yet even as the 350,000 undocumented aliens who sustained legal status for 10 years or more continue to clamor for help, federal lawmakers instead appear focused on a more recent wave of illegal immigrants.

Legislation proposed by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., that would offer recourse for Garcia and the thousands of other nonresident aliens who came to the U.S. in the late 1980s remains stuck in neutral as the congressional session wraps up this week. A similar measure introduced in the House by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas, also has stalled.

Meanwhile, in a development eliciting intense criticism from immigration and labor groups, a Senate bill that would aid illegal aliens who have worked a scant 150 days in the U.S. stands a legitimate chance of passing.

The initiative, crafted by Sens. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and Gordon Smith, R-Ore., would grant immediate legal status to undocumented immigrants who could prove they have worked five months in the last year. The catch: only farm workers would qualify.

The bill also includes a clause that would require field laborers to work in agriculture for five years to reach permanent legal status, a proviso that opponents say smacks of indentured servitude.

The vast majority of the 22,000 illegal aliens in Nevada who were stripped of their work permits last October live in the Las Vegas Valley -- a region with scarcely more agribusiness than Mars. Since they now work illegally in construction, landscaping and similar trades, the immigrants would gain nothing from passage of the proposed guest-worker reform bill.

An estimated 500,000 field laborers, by comparison, would receive temporary protected status under the measure. Garcia and other undocumented immigrants in Southern Nevada, who point out that they worked legally and paid taxes in the U.S. for a decade before losing their permits, argue that they deserve the same kind of consideration.

"We have been here working for years, they (field workers) have been here working sometimes only a few months. It is not fair," Garcia said.

The 28-year-old father of three has worked construction and landscaping jobs to support his family since losing his permit last year. Garcia typically makes $6.50 an hour, less than half what he earned while working legally for a laundry service for much of the 1990s.

But the hardship Garcia endures to make ends meet in the U.S. pales next to his fear of getting deported to Zacatecas, the hometown he fled for Las Vegas in 1988.

"Even though it is hard -- paying the bills, feeding the family -- I don't want to go back. I have nothing to live for there," Garcia said.

The prospect of Congress bestowing protected status on illegal farm workers baffles Malena Burnett. She serves as chairwoman of Fair Treatment for Immigrants, a Las Vegas nonprofit advocacy group formed a year ago with the financial aid of the Culinary Union.

Burnett has made a half-dozen trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby elected officials and the Clinton administration to grant the 350,000 illegal immigrants protected status. She regards the guest-worker bill as a prescription for repeating past mistakes.

"We are now trying to expel immigrants who have lived here for 10 or 11 years. Five or 10 years from now we'll be reliving the same cycle with the field workers," Burnett said.

"To let more (undocumented) immigrants in when you can't resolve the situation with those who have been here for 10 years or more -- it doesn't make any sense."

But the guest-worker bill does make sense in one respect: it displays the sheer political muscle of agribusiness.

The industry's economic clout gives its lobbyists leverage with politicians from ag-dependent states, where growers complain that an air-tight labor market has diminished the supply of low-wage workers. The guest-worker measure would address that demand, proponents say, and offer a form of amnesty to illegal immigrants.

No such far-ranging economic theory props up the plight of the 350,000 longtime nonresident immigrants. Their political fate rests with advocacy groups and a handful of lawmakers who plead a case of fairness -- a tough sell, Reid conceded.

"The difference is, these poor people in Nevada don't have paid lobbyists trying to help them. They've got me," he said.

The illegal immigrants hit by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last Oct. 1 are plaintiffs in numerous federal lawsuits that blame the government for hindering their efforts to gain amnesty.

Under two federal amnesty programs, the last of which had a May 1988 deadline, about 3 million aliens received exemption from deportation. Class-action suits subsequently filed on behalf of the hundreds of thousands who missed the deadline sought to force the government to grant them late amnesty on the grounds that federal agencies denied them due process.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service allowed the late-amnesty applicants to carry temporary work permits as the cases traversed the courts during the past decade, freeing them from the threat of deportation.

But the Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act of 1996 stripped federal courts of jurisdiction over appeals cases made by aliens. The 9th circuit court's ruling last fall upheld the law, voiding the permits and scuttling the legal status of the 350,000 immigrants -- most of them natives of Mexico -- involved in the litigation.

That put 22,000 immigrants statewide, including 2,000 members of the Culinary Union, out of work overnight.

"It has been mind-boggling," said Culinary Union representative Mario Rocha, who co-founded Fair Treatment for Immigrants with Burnett. "And now the government wants to bring in more immigrants instead of taking care of a situation that has been going on for years."

Reid's bill, dubbed the "Legal Amnesty Restoration Act of 1999," would enable federal courts to again intervene in the cases of late-amnesty applicants. With the measure hung up in the Judiciary Committee and lawmakers concentrating on the guest-worker bill, however, Reid said pushing his measure through could prove "an uphill battle."

Considering that most late-amnesty applicants have deeper roots in the U.S. than newly arrived field workers, Reid's proposal deserves a better fate, according to Carlos Cantu, director of immigration services for Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada.

"It's grossly unfair. Many of the late-amnesty applicants have more equities in the U.S. -- they've bought homes, they have children -- than the season-agriculture workers who haven't been here as long. And it's unfortunate that there isn't a group lobbying as hard for them as for the season-agriculture workers," Cantu said.

Officials with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that promotes the rights of the 29 million Latinos living in the U.S., want Congress to kill the guest-worker legislation.

In addition to creating "a program in which we would end up with 500,000 slaves," the measure obscures the cause of late-amnesty applicants, said Christina Chavez Cook, a legislative staff attorney with MALDEF.

"It's outrageously unfair that the people who have been waiting and waiting for something they were qualified for years ago are being overlooked because of this (guest-worker) bill," Chavez Cook said.

The United Farm Workers of America, the nation's largest agriculture labor union, opposes the guest-worker initiative for similar reasons. The bill amounts to exploitation of a cheap, captive labor force, UFW political director Rosa Linda Guillen said from the group's Sacramento office.

Guillen said granting temporary legal status to 500,000 illegal immigrants would lead to the same abuses that riddled the guest worker program for two decades after its birth in 1942: poor working and living conditions, low pay and unscrupulous employers who terminate workers without warning.

"And who's to say that five years from now Congress doesn't change its mind and decide to pull the guarantee of legal status? Then these field workers are in the same spot" as late-amnesty applicants, Guillen said.

Efrain Meza, 36, first slipped into the U.S. as a teenager from his native Baja California, Mexico, to work in the fields. Then, as a young man, he could bear the nomadic rigors of farm labor. Today, with a wife and three children, the thought of returning to the fields makes him grimace.

"You have to go from place to place, farm to farm. You live together with 20, 30 people in one house. It's very hard," Meza said. "It's sort of like living in a Third World country."

Meza obtained a work permit in 1989 after arriving in Las Vegas, where he worked as a roofer until breaking his ankle on the job three years ago. When he lost his permit last year, he no longer could afford medical treatment on his leg. Now he hobbles around construction sites, working illegally to support his family.

"It is not fair that the government has not taken care of those who are already here," Meza said. "We paid taxes, Social Security. What about us?"

Odds appear slim that the Senate will approve the guest-worker bill outright, according to Joel Najar, an immigration policy analyst with the National Council of La Raza (Spanish for "the people"), the nation's largest Hispanic advocacy group.

A likelier scenario, Najar said, would involve agriculture interests attaching their initiative to the omnibus appropriations bill that Congress will approve this week -- a bill typically so massive that lawmakers often slip in last-second measures that go undetected until after the session ends.

Moreover, even if the Graham-Smith measure dies, agribusiness -- as it has each of the last 10 years -- will push yet another guest-worker bill next session, Najar predicted.

Late-amnesty applicants take little solace in knowing that INS officials have no plans to actively pursue nonresident aliens who lack a work permit. They realize that something as minor as a traffic violation could result in a background check that would reveal their illegal status.

The specter of deportation shadows Oscar and Maria Pulgarin, who arrived in Las Vegas from Mexico City in 1988. The sense of hope they brought with them has since given way to despair.

Oscar Pulgarin, a construction worker who pulled down $12 an hour before his work permit was revoked, now must provide for his wife and 4-year-old daughter with landscaping and janitorial jobs that pay $6 to $7 an hour. As the economic noose tightens around the family -- and after a decade of paying taxes, obeying the law and putting money back into the community -- Pulgarin feels they deserve more than to twist in uncertainty.

"We're afraid we'll lose everything," he said. "We feel that everything we've done in this country has been ignored. We just feel ignored, totally ignored."

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