Lines Form as Amnesty Deadline Nears : Farm-Worker Application Period Ends at Midnight; INS ‘Inundated’

Business was brisk at amnesty immigration centers throughout San Diego County on Tuesday as hundreds of illegal aliens sought what may well be their last chance to become legal residents of the United States.

“It’s been a very heavy day,” said Art Roy, supervisor at the U. S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s legalization center in Mission Village, where officials have been accepting about 500 applications a day for the past month, contrasted with 300 a day in previous months. Similar crowds were reported at the INS’ other San Diego County amnesty office, in Escondido.

“We expect the roof to fall in tomorrow,” Roy said, “but we’ll handle it.”

Deadline Tonight

Midnight tonight marks the end of the 18-month application period for the farm-worker amnesty program, the lesser known of the two amnesty initiatives crafted by Congress in 1986 as part of a series of sweeping immigration reforms. Eligible for permanent legal residence status under the program are foreigners who performed at least 90 days of agricultural labor between May, 1985, and May, 1986. Nationwide, about 1.1 million people have applied, more than doubling initial estimates. More than 50,000 are expected to apply in San Diego County.

May 4 marked the end of the 12-month application period for the separate and more widely known general amnesty program, which raised the possibility of legal status for foreigners who had been living in the United States illegally since Jan. 1, 1982. About 1.7 million people applied for amnesty under that program, including about 40,000 in San Diego County.

Just as with the general-amnesty initiative, INS offices and social agencies that work with immigrants are reporting a last-minute rush.

“All of our offices are inundated with applications,” said Robert J. Moser, assistant director for refugee resettlement and immigration for the San Diego office of Catholic Community Services, which has signed up about 17,000 farm-worker applicants in San Diego and Imperial counties.

Familiar Reasons

When asked why they waited so long, applicants cited familiar reasons: Apprehension about approaching the INS, difficulties in obtaining the needed paper work, a shortage of cash to cover the $185 application fee and assorted other expenses.

“I just didn’t have the money,” said Primitivo Sanchez, 48, a native of the Mexican interior state of Guerrero, who submitted his application Tuesday in San Diego.

A friend, Francisco Zamora, was quick to explain the advantages of possessing a legal-residence card.

“It opens doors, it gives one more opportunity to better oneself,” said Zamora, 25. “The undocumented worker always gets the worst jobs.”

Although all applicants interviewed Tuesday said they had performed at least the requisite 90 days of field work, INS officials say use of fraudulent documents is rampant, particularly among late-arriving applicants who are eager, in some cases desperate, to obtain some kind of legal-residence document. Others say officials have exaggerated the fraud problem, holding applicants to unreasonable standards of proof of their work in the United States and probably discouraging many from ever applying.

INS officials have acknowledged exceeding agency guidelines in requiring documentary proof from more than 700 applicants in San Diego and Imperial counties. The agency said it scaled back its requests in those cases after recognizing that officials had gone overboard in requiring, among other things, that applicants provide the names of sheds where the produce they picked had been packed.

But the controversy is likely to linger. A coalition of immigrants’ rights groups is scheduled to announce the filing of a federal class-action suit against the INS in San Diego today. The coalition is expected to challenge an INS practice in which agents at U. S.-Mexico border posts seized the temporary-residence documents of hundreds of agricultural amnesty seekers after the applicants allegedly admitted having obtained the papers by giving false statements.