The brown-skinned man sat patiently in a humid union hall, rocking a baby carriage and sporting the crisp blue shirt emblazoned with the name Juan that he wears daily at his job in a peanut processing plant.
But the man known to his employer as Juan Ramirez is really Arturo Tapias, 27, an illegal alien from Mexico who desperately wants to stay in this country and now has found a helping hand.
Led by the AFL-CIO, organized labor has just set up a major effort here to assist Tapias and others who want to exit the shadowy world of lies and aliases and gain legal resident status under the new federal immigration law.
Labor`s challenge and motives are clear. Union officials estimate there may be 4 million or 5 million undocumented workers in the Los Angeles area, far more than in any other city. As telling, more than one-third of the estimated 850,000 unionists in Los Angeles County are illegals.
Unions representing such lower-wage workers as construction laborers and garment and restaurant employees have locals where illegals comprise the majority of members. But even the United Auto Workers has a 1,200-member parts plant in Van Nuys, Calif., where 90 percent are illegals.
This is why the AFL-CIO has asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service for status as a ”qualified designated entity,” or sanctioned middleman, and alloted $250,000 to open five union halls last month as centers of an ”immigrants assistance project.”
There, 22 full-time staff members meet with prospective applicants six days a week to outline the new law, explain what documents are needed and file papers with the INS.
”These (undocumented workers) are the most vulnerable members of the workforce, but they`re our future. If we can`t stand by them through this difficult period, what reason is there for them to turn to us?” asked David Sickler, the AFL-CIO`s western regional director.
Tapias, a member of the Glass, Pottery, Plastic & Allied Workers Union, showed up last week at the United Food & Commercial Workers hall in mostly Hispanic east Los Angeles. He left Mexico in 1979, changed his name to avoid detection and wants to keep a job that pays him $9.12 an hour to package nuts for places such as Disneyland.
”This is a great help and these people are somebody I trust,” he says in Spanish.
He pulls a bulging manila envelope from his child`s carriage, revealing the personal and financial records he hopes will meet the law`s key criteria: having lived here illegally on a continuous basis since Jan. 1, 1982, and being financially responsible.
Tapias seems in good shape, but many others are not as well prepared. The center`s supervisor, Armando Garcia, finishes his explanation of the law and faces a flurry of questions.
How many paycheck stubs does one need? Will a letter from an employer be enough? What if a man has lost his passport? What happens if a husband is eligible, but a wife isn`t? How do you prove continuous residence if you lived an entire year in a trailer?
”Their lives are at stake,” says Garcia. ”A lot leave this room sad when they find out the results. They all want to stay.”
The AFL-CIO has embarked on the ambitious endeavor for three reasons, according to Michael Calabrese, a chief architect of the effort.
First, it wants to help undocumented union members. Many would be vulnerable under the law, and therefore wary of striking or being otherwise militant at work.
Second, it wants to provide a public service to ethnic communities, especially Hispanic, where its reputation was tarnished during congressional debate over the immigration bill by its support of sanctions against employers who hired illegals.
Third, it wants to reduce the peril looming over many recent organizing drives. Union-resisting employers have reported undocumented workers to the INS–and then replaced them with other illegals.
The AFL-CIO has produced hundreds of thousands of handy pamphlets explaining the law. They`re in union halls nationwide, in Spanish, seven Asian languages and, thanks to the Chicago Federation of Labor, in Polish.
The process unfolds in five stages. Applicants attend a basic information-registration meeting and get an amnesty packet with a translated version of the key INS form and a checklist of useful documents, such as a W-2 form, utility receipts, school reports and bank records.
This is followed by a second detailed session on needed documents, including how to request records from government agencies and private firms. Then, there`s a one-on-one meeting with a ”document counselor” where all is checked and the applicant is fingerprinted and photographed.
If all is fine, he or she goes to a downtown union office where the data is placed in a computer that spits out a completed official application. Finally, there`s a review by union lawyers and submission of the form to the INS.
The price for the union assistance can`t be beat, especially since the AFL-CIO spends 8 to 10 hours on many cases. Union members are charged $55 and up to $150 for their families; nonmembers pay $75 and $250, less than or equal to the Catholic Church, which also has a massive program to help the illegals. That`s in addition to the fees applicants pay to the INS, $185 for an adult and a family limit of $420.
If the union experience so far is a good indicator, there are unsettling lessons to be learned, according to Andres Bustamante, the project`s 32-year- old legal director.
A large majority of illegals are too scared to apply for resident status; there is ”mass confusion” over the law, and misinformation is spread by a cottage industry of lawyers, notaries and fly-by-night entrepreneurs, some of whom swindle naive illegals out of thousands of dollars.
Confusion pervades the INS itself, as seen last week when union staffers met with federal officials in a Laborers Union hall in El Monte, Calif.
It became evident that contradictory INS directives have been issued on the eligibility of certain types of people.
Few of the illegals` tales are identical, a fact now well-known to AFL-CIO staffers Eric Cohen, 26, a Stanford Law School graduate, and Mirtha Rodriquez, 25, a student at San Francisco`s Hastings College of Law.
There`s a young woman whose brother previously applied for citizenship, but lied about whether he ”harbored” any other illegals–namely her.
She`s been threatened by her brother, says Cohen, and told not to disclose his untruth, prompting worry that she`ll be deported if she lies to protect him.
There`s a Salvadoran couple who came here in 1979. The husband, 30, a department store clerk, has lived in the U.S. continuous for eight years, but his wife and their daughter left for six months in 1985 to visit the woman`s gravely ill mother.
”This can be horrifying to many,” said Rodriquez. ”How can we divide families?”
Cases do get complex and sometimes can border on the mildly comic.
A woman is living with her second husband in California, though she still is married to a man in Nevada. Is she violating INS ban against bigamy or polygamy?
A government official smiled a somewhat perplexed smile and replied,
”Tell her to divorce the guy in Nevada. It would make things a lot simpler.”
