Immigration reform again coming into national focus

Patricia Hernandez has the unenviable job of cleaning up the mess left by undergraduates at UC Berkeley.
“Whatever they break, we fix it,” she said, sitting on a dormitory couch during her morning break. “Change light bulbs, fix furniture, fix toilets, unclog toilets, replace toilets.”
Hernandez, 48, is not complaining, just describing. She is proud of the job she has held for 18 years and the financial security it brings. She loves that her brother is a cook at a nearby campus cafeteria and that her daughter works as a pharmacy technician a few blocks away.
She loves it because 40 years ago, she was living in a Mexican orphanage. Twenty-five years ago, she was living in a car in Southern California and struggling to find work because she was an illegal immigrant.
“Like everybody else, I jumped the border,” she said. Then, about 23 years ago, she got lucky.
For Hernandez and thousands of other Bay Area residents 1987 marked the end of a life of hiding and the beginning of life as an American.
It was the year the Immigration Reform and Control Act, approved by Congress in 1986 and signed by President Ronald Reagan, went into effect. In a matter of months, Hernandez went from being undocumented to having a greencard, and years later she was able to obtain citizenship. She sighs today as she imagines how life would be different without it.
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The legalized immigrants have joined the ranks of other Americans, raising children and welcoming grandchildren, and the once-a-decade national census does not differentiate them from their neighbors. Some stuck with their pre-amnesty occupations or moved up the career ladder. Some have retired or will soon. More than half — about 1.6 million — lived in California when they won their greencards, but researchers believe thousands eventually dispersed to other states that offered new opportunities.
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Road to a better life
For Rosalinda Rodriguez, though, and many like her, amnesty was a road to a better life. Rodriguez remembers her visit in 1987 to the Franklin Street immigration office in downtown Oakland, where she brought utility bills and other paperwork — anything she had that would prove to interviewers she had been living in the United States since the 1970s.
In the Bay Area, the law’s potential beneficiaries were cautious, arriving over a yearlong period in a trickle, not a rush, according to newspaper reports from the time. The deadline to apply was May 1988.
The requirements were simple: To get a greencard, immigrants had to be living in the United States since before 1982 and have the documents to prove it. They would also have to pay a $185-per-person fee.
Rodriguez’s visit, she knows now, would change her life, transforming the Mexican immigrant from someone who was fearful and working in the shadows of the East Bay economy to a union hotel worker and grandmother confident to speak up for herself.
“They treat people differently when they know they can take advantage of you,” said Rodriguez, who has cleaned rooms at the downtown Marriott hotel for nearly 20 years. “In my job now, I can speak up. I can speak without fear.”
Rodriguez later bought a home in West Oakland. Life for her family in this recession is not easy, she said, but it is far less stressful than if she had no authorization to be living here.
“We’ve tried to progress,” she said. “If you don’t have papers, you can’t qualify for a loan, and everybody dreams of having their own house.”
By the end of the first phase of the amnesty program, 15,564 immigrants had won their greencards through the Oakland office, 22,580 from the San Francisco office and 23,185 from the San Jose office, according to government records. The Bay Area numbers were higher than many parts of the country but a fraction compared to Southern California, where more than 583,000 people obtained their legal residency through the Los Angeles/Long Beach immigration office alone. The majority of California’s amnesty recipients were originally from Mexico, though Asian immigrants and other Latinos were also prevalent.
Once the first phase was completed, undocumented agricultural workers had their own chance of becoming legal residents. That program was more generous, saying farm workers needed only to have been performing seasonal farm work in the United States for 90 days, not five years, and it was also more vulnerable to fraud as opportunists charged hundreds of dollars to forge letters of support from farmers. The deadline to apply was Nov. 1988.

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Tags: Add new tag, Illegal immigration, Immigration, Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, Mexico, Ronald Reagan, Southern California, United States, United States Congress