'We Are Overwhelmed"

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

With illegal immigration rising, Congress belatedly tries to act

By twilight, about 300 illegal immigrants had massed on "the soccer field," a patch of rock-strewn brown earth halfway up Otay Mesa and just across the U.S. border from a rundown section of Tijuana, Mexico. Some bought tacos from a vendor who wheeled a white cart through the crowd; others burned old tires to cook makeshift meals before pushing off into the rattlesnake-infested canyons leading toward San Ysidro, Calif., and points north. Two dozen agents of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), deployed in Dodge Ram trucks on surrounding hillsides, squinted through binoculars to count the aliens and prepare to intercept them.

As the light faded, groups of pollos (chickens, a slang term for the immigrants, who tend to travel in flocks) filed into the canyons and the chase began. A border patrolman looking through an infrared nightscope at a hillside spotted four human shapes and summoned a helicopter hovering over a nearby ravine, but by the time the chopper arrived they were gone. Another agent was about to leap out of his truck and arrest three illegals in Moody's Canyon when his radio crackled out news of bigger game: a dozen immigrants heading toward the fields abutting Otay Mesa Road. The patrolman gunned his Ram along rutted dirt paths, dodging boulders placed by pollos to slow him down. When he reached Otay Mesa Road, however, his quarry too had disappeared, presumably picked up by smugglers driving cars or trucks toward El None.

The illegal visitors had one more major obstacle to pass: an INS checkpoint on Interstate 5, where agents kept a sharp watch for vehicles heavily weighted toward the rear or bouncing oddly. Those are clues that pollos may be hiding in the trunks of cars or under the floorboards of false-bottom pickup trucks. On this particular Sunday night, agents working the 3 p.m.-to-11 p.m. shift rounded up 155 aliens and took them to a detention center. INS guards then put the pollos aboard buses, drove them to a border crossing and herded them through a wire gate back into Mexico. Nearly all would try to slip across the border again, many only hours later the same night. They would keep coming until they eventually escaped to pursue the irresistible lure of jobs that are unavailable in Mexico. Says Alan Eliason, chief of border patrols in that section of California: "We are overwhelmed. Congress has to come to grips with the problem."

Belatedly, Congress is trying. After long hesitation, the House last week began debate on a bill, already passed twice by the Senate, that is supposed at least to slow the torrent of illegal immigrants across the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexican border. A floor vote on the Simpson-Mazzoli bill (named for its coauthors, Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Democratic Congressman Romano Mazzoli of Kentucky) is expected this week. President Reagan put in a plug for passage at his news conference Thursday night. Said he, with a touch of hyperbole: "We have lost control of our own borders, and no nation can do that and survive."

Simpson-Mazzoli is an intricate compromise, combining amnesty for many illegal immigrants already in the U.S. with a system of fines against employers who hire future evaders of the border patrols. The employer sanctions are supposed to dry up the supply of jobs for pollos. The bill has been attacked as both too soft and too tough, and denounced as "racist" by some Hispanic leaders. Indeed, its opponents span the ideological spectrum from Jesse Helms on the Republican right to Jesse Jackson on the Democratic left, and include both Walter Mondale and Gary Hart. Less political critics question whether Simpson-Mazzoli can be effectively enforced; some are even afraid that the promise of amnesty might draw in more illegal immigrants than the fines against employers would discourage.

None of which should be any surprise; just about every aspect of the immigration question is enveloped in emotional dispute, down to the basic numbers. Estimates of how many illegal aliens are already in the U.S. run as high as 15 million; the Census Bureau's guess is somewhere between 3.5 million and 6 million. But there is no question that the tide is rising.

The INS, which generally counts itself lucky to nab half the incoming aliens even temporarily, tabulated a record 1,251,357 arrests during fiscal 1983, up 22% from the previous year and just about double the figure a decade earlier. In the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, arrests have increased an additional 10%.

A growing number of immigrants are Salvadorans and other Central Americans fleeing guerrilla war and political oppression as well as economic deprivation. But the largest group is composed of Mexicans who see little chance of earning a satisfactory living in their crowded homeland. To enter the U.S. most pay $250 to $350 each to smuggler-guides called coyotes, who sometimes rob or beat them. If they elude the INS, the immigrants usually can find jobs in an expanding Sunbelt economy. If employers sometimes pay them less than the $3.35 an hour minimum wage--well, they still earn substantially more than they could in Mexico, where the minimum wage is the equivalent of 55-c- an hour for those lucky enough to find work.

(No less than half the Mexican labor force is either totally unemployed or can find only part-time work.) The economic effects of the illegal immigration are fiercely debated, and both sides offer primarily anecdotal evidence.

Labor leaders and other backers of Simpson-Mazzoli often view the aliens as a rising menace to both the jobs and the pay of U.S. citizens. Says Roger Conner, director of the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform: "I talked the other day to a Los Angeles contractor who told me he had just replaced a $20-an-hour American mason with an illegal $5-an-hour mason who is just as good. If nothing is done, wages for American workers will erode, and resentment among Americans will build dangerously."

Defenders of the pollos claim that most take menial work as farm laborers, janitors, hospital orderlies, chambermaids or dishwashers. "The truth is that no one else wants these jobs," says Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies in La Jolla, Calif. He cites a survey of 13 Los Angeles-area firms whose illegal employees were returned to Mexico after INS raids. Eventually four-fifths of them slipped back across the border and reclaimed their jobs, which their employers were not able to fill.

Hispanic leaders charge bitterly that alarm over illegal immigration is being spurred not by economic pain but by simple dislike of people with dark skins who speak Spanish. "There is a paranoia in this country directed against Hispanics," says Arnoldo Torres, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. But there is a legitimate concern too about whether the U.S. can absorb immigrants at the rate they are now flooding in. Last week that worry led the House to take up Simpson-Mazzoli, despite the long reluctance of many Congressmen to deal with such an emotional issue.

Provisions of the complex bill range from funds for a 45% increase in manpower for the INS border guards to permission for farmers to import legally each year perhaps as many as 500,000 migrants, who would work as long as eleven months picking crops. But the core of the bill is contained in two sections:

Amnesty. The House version would permit illegal aliens to claim legal status as permanent residents of the U.S. if they could prove that they had been living in the U.S. continuously since before Jan. 1, 1982. The Senate-passed bill contains a more complicated, two-step amnesty provision. The reasoning in both cases: since it would be impossible to round up and deport every illegal alien, those immigrants who have demonstrated a long-term commitment to the U.S. should be allowed to come out of the shadows and live openly under American law. Also, though proponents rarely say so, some form of amnesty is thought necessary to placate the Hispanic voters that both parties will be courting during the presidential campaign.

The House bill would make aliens wait five years after recognition as legal residents before they could qualify for federally funded welfare programs, such as food stamps and Medicaid. That would hold down the cost of the bill to the Federal Treasury, which is estimated at $8 billion over five years. Nonetheless, many conservatives argue that it is morally wrong to roll out the welcome mat for people who deliberately broke the law. They have enough adherents among Sunbelt Democrats to threaten a close House vote on the amnesty provision this week.

Employer Sanctions. Business people would be required to make every job applicant produce a U.S. passport, birth certificate or Social Security card and one other document, such as a driver's license or work permit, to indicate that he or she is a legal resident of the U.S. Anyone caught hiring "undocumented" applicants would be warned, then fined up to $2,000 for each such worker on the payroll.

This is the most bitterly disputed provision in the entire bill. Some civil liberties activists fear that the demand for documentation constitutes a step toward a fascist-style system of national identity cards. Hispanic leaders argue that biased employers would refuse to hire any workers with Spanish surnames or accents and, if challenged under civil rights laws, would claim they suspected that the applicants' documentation was phony. On a key vote last week, however, the House rejected, 304 to 120, an attempt by California Democrat Edward Roybal to strike employer fines from the bill. Backers of Simpson-Mazzoli did permit opponents to delete criminal penalties, including up to a year in jail, for employers who hire undocumented workers. But House leaders expect some form of criminal sanction to be restored in any bill that clears the Senate-House conference.

For all that, dispassionate critics of Simpson-Mazzoli seriously doubt that its approach can work. Some employers, they suspect, would willingly pay fines in order to continue hiring cheap immigrant labor, and the aliens could easily buy forged identity documents. Eleven states already have legislated penalties against employers who hire illegal immigrants, with little or no effect. California has had such a law on its books since 1971, and it probably draws more pollos than any other state. Moreover, these critics say, even a limited amnesty would set a precedent that might lure still more aliens across the border in the hope that if they could evade the INS long enough, they too might someday become legal residents. Immigration experts in Texas apprehensively note that in the past, false rumors of amnesty have spurred an immediate jump in the numbers of aliens heading north.

The opponents of Simpson-Mazzoli, however, have been unable to offer any convincing alternative. Some contend that tighter enforcement of wage-and-hour laws in the U.S. and beefing up the INS border patrols could slow the tide of aliens. That seems unlikely; Cornelius, for one, believes that only "fullscale militarization" of the U.S.-Mexican border, a step that nobody advocates, could do the job. Others contend the real solution would be to build up the Mexican economy so that it could offer good jobs to those now crossing the border. But that is wishful thinking: American voters are in no mood to approve the enormous foreign-aid sums that would be required, and even if they were, there is no guarantee that any such effort could cure Mexico's many economic problems. In the end the Simpson-Mazzoli approach seems likely to get an unenthusiastic go-ahead for the simplest reason: there is a growing consensus, right or wrong, that something has to be done, and nobody can think of anything better.

--By George J. Church.

Reported by Carolyn Lesh/Washington and Richard Woodbury/San Diego

With reporting by Carolyn Lesh/Washington and Richard Woodbury/San Diego