Читать книгу To Be An American - Bill Ong Hing - Страница 17

I am often asked by students and friends, especially those who work with community-based organizations, why I decided to specialize in immigration law. My sense is that they are seeking a romanticized answer about how I was moved by my parents’ struggles with the immigration process, or that I was inspired by the plight of migrants and refugees seeking freedom or a better life, or that perhaps the inequities of the immigration laws or enforcement procedures sparked my interest. Indeed any of these explanations could be plausible. But the truth is that I fell into the field because the only opening available in the office where I wanted to work was in immigration law.

Upon entering law school, specializing in immigration law was not the plan. During the summer after my first year of law school, I volunteered as a law clerk in the Chinatown/North Beach Office of the San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation (SFNLAF). A variety of cases were assigned to me, but most pertained to landlord-tenant disputes or consumer issues. The work was so rewarding and stimulating that I continued to clerk there until I graduated in 1974. Clearly, law school would have been a miserable time but for my concurrent work at SFNLAF that provided context and meaning for my training as a lawyer. By bar exam time, SFNLAF was unequivocally the place I wanted to work. Since the only opening was in immigration, I grabbed it and soon found myself immersed in a workload of over a hundred open cases.

In retrospect, becoming an immigration lawyer made sense for me. As it turns out, practicing any kind of law in or near Chinatown in the mid-1970s would have meant working with immigrants, given the changing demographics of the community. Although the 1970 census counted more U.S.-born than foreign-born Chinese Americans, by 1980 the reverse was true. But as the son of an immigrant, with many immigrant relatives, and growing up in a town with numerous immigrant residents, becoming an immigration lawyer has meant something special, as it would for anyone with a similar background.

Stories from my own family’s immigration history provide plenty of fuel for my interest in the field. My father was born in Oong On Lei Village in Canton Province, China in 1893, and entered the United States on a false claim to U.S. citizenship. He admitted that he was born in China in 1893. But his father, who had been a cook during the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad, claimed that his birth certificate was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and that he had traveled to China around the time that my father was conceived. Therefore, my father entered as the son of a U.S. citizen. My mother was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1901, and was therefore a U.S. citizen at birth. When she was three, she accompanied her mother, a native of China, to China so that her mother could care for her own ailing mother. My parents met in 1920 through a marriage broker who escorted my father to my mother’s village, Ngan Voo. My mother was not one of the women in the village looking for a husband, but my father spotted her at a distance and insisted on meeting her. My mother eventually immigrated as the spouse of a U.S. citizen. Although she was a citizen at birth, she could not reenter as a citizen for two reasons. First, she did not have her birth records to prove her place of birth. And second, technically she had lost her citizenship by marrying a foreign national at a time when the law stripped women of U.S. citizenship for marrying foreign men. Of course my father was making a false claim to citizenship, so their situation presented a messy picture to say the least.

Before my mother could reenter the United States in 1926 as the spouse of a U.S. citizen, she had to pass inspection at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. Between 1910 and 1940, about fifty thousand Chinese were confined—often for months and years at a time—in Angel Island’s bleak wooden barracks, where inspectors would conduct grueling interrogations. In a sense, my mother was lucky because her detention on Angel Island lasted only a week. Months earlier, she had received coaching instructions from my father (who had returned to the United States soon after their marriage) on how to answer certain questions. This was typical of the Chinese immigrants of the time. The strict exclusion laws forced distortions of family trees and histories if immigration was to succeed. The schemes devised to thwart the racist immigration laws were ingenious. For both the successful and unsuccessful, however, it was agonizing to be compelled to lie and cheat in order to reunite with family members.

The directions to my mother were more unusual than most because she had been born in the United States. She was to assert birth in China and marriage to my father, the son of a purported U.S. native. A claim to U.S. citizenship by my mother would likely result in serious delay; records in Scranton would have to be obtained and a call for my mother’s alienated brothers on the eastern seaboard to come testify would have been probable. So when my mother was called in for interrogation a week after arriving at Angel Island, she was questioned for about thirty minutes and was deemed admissible as the spouse of a citizen.

Growing up in Superior, I also had a sense of the gender imbalance that plagued the Chinese American community for decades after the enactment of the Chinese exclusion laws. I grew up in a small house attached to my mother’s small grocery store. The store and house were on the poorest street in Pinal County, a rural part of south-central Arizona. The store consisted of three small aisles of food, a small butcher area, and an area with dry goods—shoes, fabric, hurricane lamps, and the like. The small second floor of the back storeroom contained six narrow rooms with little headroom that we used for storage. As a child, I learned that during the 1920s and 1930s these rooms were actually used as sleeping quarters by men who came from China without their wives to work for my father. They cooked and ate in one of the slightly larger rooms of the musty, dank second floor.

Two of the men who worked for my father were an uncle and a cousin whom I grew up knowing. They were Geen Hong Go (Uncle Art) and Cherng Goo Cherng (Uncle Charlie). Having entered the United States with false papers, they were always introduced to the townspeople as my father’s brothers. Although both had lived in the United States since the 1920s or 1930s, their wives and children did not join them until the early 1960s. Uncle Charlie’s wife (Cherng Goo) was my father’s sister. But because of my family’s disordered history, she immigrated as my father’s sister-in-law.

The memory of my aunt Cherng Goo’s arrival is a stark reminder of the effects of years of exclusion. As a kid, I wanted to be a basketball star. So when my parents told me that my aunt had been a champion basketball player in her youth, I was beside myself with excitement. I practiced diligently for weeks in anticipation of our first encounter, expecting a great shooting and dribbling display from her upon her arrival. But by the time her metaphorical boat came in, she was an elderly woman whose basketball-playing days had long since passed. We had all been victimized by the exclusion laws.

My immigration memories span a continuum from my family to my clients. A distant older cousin fled to Mexico after being indicted for selling false green cards. My mother underwent intensive preparation to testify at an immigration hearing on behalf of another relative. Years later, when I practiced in Chinatown, I met hundreds of clients who had similar stories of false papers and family histories to gain entry into the United States during the exclusionary era. Throughout my life, and especially after I became a lawyer, I have often marveled at the ingenious schemes my ancestors and other Chinese devised to thwart the immigration policymaker “ghosts,” as they were called. For decades, the authorities were determined to exclude the “Yellow Peril,” yet many Chinese were able to overcome the racist laws by inventing families, occupations, backgrounds, and birth certificates destroyed in earthquakes.

Over the years, the questions related to immigration directed to my parents’ generation did not rekindle fond memories. The historical prejudices codified against my uncles and aunts, grandfathers and grandmothers resulted in pain. They were forced to lie and to cheat because of the oppressive racial biases of others. Thus, my veneration for their creative schemes inevitably turns to anger after the sobering realization that, despite the anecdotal successes of many in evading discriminatory immigration policies, my ancestors unnecessarily bore tremendous hardships.

Most of my Chinese cases have pertained to visa matters. But over the years I have represented several hundred clients—of myriad nationalities—in deportation proceedings. In the late 1970s, part of my function as a legal services attorney was to provide public defender-type representation to aliens who had been arrested by the INS in the San Francisco region. I visited the detention branch on a daily basis to interview detainees, and cooperated with the Immigration Court when they needed an attorney to provide representation. Nationals of Canada, Nigeria, the Philippines, Iran, Ireland, Great Britain, and other parts of Europe were often in the detention area. In fact, every month or so I would encounter young European tourists in their twenties who turned themselves in for deportation because they had run out of spending money. I recall a Caucasian man who was born in China to Portuguese parents, who was being deported to Portugal even though he had never lived there. And there was a Greek client who immigrated at the age of three, but was being deported at the age of twenty-seven for possession of marijuana. In the 1980s, I represented many Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States, including one Nicaraguan whose case became a precedent-setting decision in the Supreme Court. I also helped to represent a black South African who was granted asylum because of apartheid.

But over the years, most of those I have represented in deportation proceedings have been Mexican nationals. Representing Mexicans in deportation proceedings always came naturally. The vast majority of my Mexican clients reminded me of neighbors, friends, and grocery store customers from Superior. They were gracious, honest, hardworking, friendly, grateful, and committed to their families. They appreciated my limited Spanish-speaking ability.

I recall introducing my wife, a Chinese American raised in San Francisco Chinatown, to a Mexican family I was representing shortly after our marriage in 1976. The family had been subjected to a harrowing, abusive raid by INS agents at 5 a.m. one morning, and I needed to get a better idea of what had transpired by visiting them at their home in San Jose, California. So on a Sunday afternoon, my wife and I drove to San Jose to call on the family. My wife had had little contact with Mexicans—or any Latinos for that matter—growing up. She was aware of my legal work conceptually, but had never met any of my clients. Over the course of the afternoon, as she experienced my clients’ warmth, generosity, and hospitality, my wife became their strongest advocate for resisting deportation. How in the world, she asked, could they be hurting anyone; and why in the world would the INS want to deport such a decent family? After a struggle that took almost a decade, I was able to obtain lawful permanent residence status for the entire family.

Most of my clients have been Mexican because Mexicans have long been the focus of INS enforcement priorities. Of the 1,327,259 deportable aliens located by the INS in 1993, 95.6 percent (1,269,294) were Mexican nationals,¹ in spite of the fact that by all estimates Mexicans make up less than half of the undocumented population in the United States. So anyone willing to represent low-income immigrants as I have over the years will naturally have a caseload that is substantially Mexican.

Take the case of Rodolfo Martinez Padilla.² Rodolfo was a client of the Immigration Law Clinic which I directed at the Stanford Law School. In the fall of 1993, with the assistance of students enrolled in the clinic, Rodolfo, who was in deportation proceedings, succeeded in having those proceedings suspended and was granted lawful permanent resident status. To qualify, Rodolfo had to establish continuous physical presence in the United States for at least seven years, good moral character, and extreme hardship if deportation had been ordered.³

I first met Rodolfo in 1987, and found his work record, his worldview, and his attitudes about the United States typical of the thousands of immigrants—especially Mexicans—I have represented, been consulted about, or grew up with in Superior. His story and those of other Mexican immigrants are important because much of the current debate over immigration is about Mexican immigration.

Rodolfo’s family and circumstances surrounding his migration to the United States are not unusual. Born in 1963 in a small town in the state of Michoacan in northern Mexico, Rodolfo, accompanied by his uncles, first crossed the border at the age of ten. He returned to Mexico but came back to the United States in 1979 with his parents and siblings. Since then they have lived in the East Palo Alto/Redwood City area, which is about thirty miles south of San Francisco. Rodolfo attended one year of public high school in 1980. His entire immediate family—his father, mother, two older brothers, one older sister, two younger sisters, and a younger brother—resides in the United States. Most of the family became lawful permanent residents through the legalization (amnesty) program of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). Rodolfo is married and has two U.S. citizen children (one from a prior relationship); he sees and cares for both of them regularly. He acts as a constant mentor and “big brother” to his nephews and nieces. The entire family has regular get-togethers, picnics, and barbecues. Except for his mother, all the adults in Rodolfo’s family have paying jobs. None has ever received public assistance.

Rodolfo’s employment history may be of particular interest to people concerned with the impact that immigrants such as Rodolfo have on the labor market. As with many immigrants, the family’s primary method of finding jobs is through word of mouth and mutual help. Rodolfo and his family have a very strong and active network of friends and family that they rely on to hear about and to get work. At just about every place Rodolfo has worked, some family member has been employed at some point in time. Rodolfo always has his ears open for new opportunities, and the community is a vitally active highway of information. If someone loses a job, friends help with loans and a new job search.

Rodolfo has done a fair amount of “pavement pounding,” going from business to business and filling out applications. He says that when he was young he would get on a bus and go to San Jose (about fifty miles south of San Francisco). He would apply for work in establishments along the main boulevard—El Camino Road—the entire route home. Sometimes he would fill out six applications a day. Although he reads the newspaper, he has not used it to get information about jobs. Current and former employers always gave Rodolfo a good reference for prospective new employers. Often Rodolfo has held two jobs at the same time in order to better support his family.

A chronicle of Rodolfo’s jobs and job-finding methods is illuminating:

1. He secured his first job at a restaurant, Le Lumiere in Menlo Park, through his father and his uncle who both worked there. His father got the Le Lumiere job from his brother (Rodolfo’s uncle) who was working there previously. When his uncle quit, his job was given to Rodolfo’s father. Rodolfo initially started working there to help his father for free.⁴ He was working as a dishwasher when the owners noticed and liked his work more than they liked his father’s work. Although Rodolfo was young and still in high school, they fired his father and gave him the job. The wife of the owner of Le Lumiere owned another restaurant, Carol’s, and she asked Rodolfo to work there as well. Rodolfo would work at Carol’s in the morning and Le Lumiere in the afternoons and evening. Rodolfo dropped out of high school when he was eighteen because he was working very long hours (sixteen hours a day) and felt that he could not go to school at the same time. He started working at the age of seventeen in 1980. He left these jobs because of the long hours and he felt that he was not earning enough money. Each place paid about $100 per week. His bosses offered to pay him more money, but he felt that the raise was not enough to compensate him for the number of hours he was working. His departure was amicable; later when he needed a recommendation for his job at the Discount Club, these employers were happy to provide it. Rodolfo also knew that he could make more money working in the kitchen of a restaurant rather than just washing dishes. He looked for and found jobs in restaurants where he would start out as a dishwasher, but eventually have the opportunity to work in the kitchen.

2. Rodolfo found the job at Wata, a drug manufacturer, by going to an unemployment office in San Mateo where jobs are posted. He had no problem getting access to these listings in spite of the fact that he was asked for a green card, by providing proof that he and his family had been in the United States for a long time and that he had attended school here. His mastery of English was very helpful in this situation. Rodolfo worked at Wata inspecting pills, but had to leave because he became allergic to the chemicals. He was paid about $150 per week at Wata.

3. Between his job at Wata and his job at Spiral, Rodolfo worked at Andre’s Restaurant. This was one of the restaurants where he worked up to helping in the kitchen. He eventually left Andre’s because they were not paying him enough money. He was paid about $150 per week. In general, he usually left restaurant jobs because a better opportunity made itself available. For some time he worked at Spiral in the morning and at Andre’s at night.

4. Spiral Engineering hired Rodolfo first as a janitor then as a machine operator because his sister worked there as a supervisor. Other family members were already working there: his aunt, mother, and father. His boss regarded Rodolfo as one of his best and most conscientious workers, and was sorry to see Rodolfo leave for a better job later. Spiral was paying him $4.20 an hour. During some of the time that Rodolfo worked at Star, he also worked at the Elks Club part-time as a janitor. The Elks Club paid $4.50 an hour. Rodolfo’s brother worked at the Elks Club for eleven years as a janitor. His brother got the job through a friend. His brother was looking for work by applying to businesses near his family’s residence. One day when he was visiting various businesses, he saw a friend working outside the Elks Club building and asked him if he would help him submit his application. Rodolfo’s brother stopped working at the Elks Club because he wanted to make more money. He now works in a pet food business, and got that job through Rodolfo. Rodolfo was working at the Discount Club and one of his coworkers was the son of the owner of the pet food business. Rodolfo asked his friend to help his brother get a job there.

5. Rodolfo got a job at Splashmaster, a swimming pool company, through a different sister who was working there. Apparently she found out that they needed someone to cut pipes, and she told him to apply. Rodolfo also left Splashmaster because of the low pay (about $100 per week).

6. For a while, Rodolfo worked for an industrial janitorial service as an employee (as opposed to an independent contractor). He only stayed for two months because it was “a heavy job.” The hours were very long, he had to operate heavy machinery, and he was paid $4.50 an hour.

7. Rodolfo got his job with the Discount Club through an uncle who was working there (the same one who was working for Le Lumiere). His uncle told Rodolfo that they were looking for janitors. He applied and got the job. He worked there steadily and once received the Employee of the Month award. He got bonuses every month. As a steady employee, he accumulated vacation and sick leave time, and also donated money to the United Way through regular payroll deductions (he also does that at his current place of employment). He started at $5.85 an hour and when he left was receiving $7.66 an hour. During his time at the Discount Club, Rodolfo also worked a second job, about two or three hours a day, at Sandwood Market. He was a stock boy and bagger and was in charge of reloading the soft drink machine and carrying out bottles. Unfortunately, Rodolfo injured his back on the job at the Discount Club, because of heavy lifting and running a large floor scrubbing machine. He received disability compensation for two years, and is now working at a less strenuous job. Rodolfo was a well-regarded employee at the Discount Club. At his deportation hearing, his supervisor submitted a letter of support.

8. Rodolfo got his current job at Star Products, where he is a machine operator assembling electronic and computer parts, through his sister-in-law who works there. She encouraged him to apply for the job and put in a good word for him. When he first started working at Star Products he was working on the assembly line, putting together electronic parts. One Saturday he was asked if he would be able to work overtime in another department where workers operated machines and conducted much more complex and detailed work. Based on his performance that day, the supervisor of the department took Rodolfo off the assembly lines and added him permanently to the machine operator department. This job entailed more responsibility and required extensive training. Today he operates delicate machinery that assembles wiring and other computer and electronics parts, and earns a higher wage than he did in his previous position. Some months ago, Rodolfo had to be hospitalized for a hernia. Company officials valued and trusted him enough to lend him $1,000 for his medical bills. He repaid the entire amount within four months. He’s been there almost one year and is paid $5.00 an hour.

Except for his injury at the Discount Club, Rodolfo’s primary reason for leaving jobs has been a desire to earn more money or because a new and better opportunity presented itself. After working long days—sometimes sixteen hours—and discovering at the end of the week that his earnings totaled under $300, he looked for better opportunities. Through his network of friends and relatives, he kept his eyes and ears open for any available opportunities, either for himself or for others.

As an ambitious and independent person, Rodolfo has demonstrated entrepreneurial skills as well. When he was on disability, he was quite concerned that he would be unable to make a living. He approached his father and proposed that they work together to make extra money. Since his father is an excellent mechanic, they bought and fixed used cars, and then sold the cars for a profit. For example, they bought one truck body for $300, and after they had fixed it, sold it for $4,000. At his father’s suggestion, Rodolfo also moved back in with the family during his recovery so that Rodolfo could cut down on living expenses. Today Rodolfo’s father continues to buy and repair used cars, but Rodolfo cannot help him because he is busy with his job at Star Products and with setting up his business.

Rodolfo has made an agreement with the president of Star Products about becoming an independent contractor to provide the company with janitorial services. The way this came about is that Rodolfo noticed that the president often complained about the regular janitorial service. Apparently, they are very sloppy in their work, sometimes leaving the offices in a worse state than when they arrived. Rodolfo started picking up after them because he thought that the mess they left reflected poorly on the company. Customers frequent this establishment and he believed that it was important to have a clean work environment. Eventually the president noticed and suggested that he contract with the company independently to clean the place up after-hours. Rodolfo took this suggestion seriously and decided that this would be an important business opportunity for himself and his family.

Since he spoke with the president of the company, he has been slowly buying pieces of cleaning equipment, some costing as much as $1,600. Initially Rodolfo plans to work his regular day hours at the company and then have his wife help him clean the Star Products facilities at night. He figures that the president of Star Products has other business connections that Rodolfo’s business can benefit from. In time, he hopes to expand his business with these connections and looks forward to owning his own business. He has thought out, planned, and negotiated all the details very carefully. At first, he will be working on a probationary basis in order to allow his employer to examine his work to make sure it is satisfactory. During this time, the president has agreed to pay him a regular wage (as if he were doing his regular job), but at an overtime rate. After one month, if his work is satisfactory, he will go on contract status and finally be independent. He will be securing a worker’s compensation package for himself and his wife, and he has applied for a business license. He learned what he needed to do to start his independent janitorial contract business by helping and observing a friend who owns his own janitorial contracting service. He helped his friend finish jobs out of friendship and without compensation. Now this friend is advising Rodolfo and helping him start his own business.

Allegations about the economic “impact” of immigrants brings to mind acquaintances and former clients like Rodolfo and his family. They are not representative of all immigrants. But they are also not atypical. Most of my Mexican clients have been more like Rodolfo than unlike him. They defy the stereotype of the poor immigrant lured across the border by the ease of life on welfare. They are hardworking, honest, very family oriented, and not criminals. As Rodolfo’s job history reveals, they may take low-paying jobs, but they keep an eye open for better-paying positions. The twin economic arguments—job and wage displacement, and net fiscal burdens in the public sector—appear to involve contradictory stereotypes of the hardworking immigrant willing to take any job, and the pathologically welfare-dependent or costly immigrant.

Anticipating that some will be skeptical of an anecdotal approach centered around the experiences of one individual, I now turn to hard economic realities.