Why amnesty failed; how to make it work for illegal immigrants.

• Author: DeParle, Jason
• Position: Includes related information

Why Amnesty Failed

How to make it work for illegal immigrants

Eva has a problem. She's lived in Chicago for eight years as an illegal immigrant. The new immigration law that took effect last May gives her the chance to shed that illegal status for a work permit and eventual citizenship. But Eva lacks the paper trail she needs to prove her history of U.S. residence. She lacks the hundreds of dollars it would cost her to apply. And she lacks the faith that immigration authorities won't deport her children, who didn't begin arriving from Mexico until 1984, two years after the amnesty cut-off date. "If I give them the names of my children," she says, "they'll take them."

As the year-long legalization program draws to a close, there are hundreds of thousands of Evas: illegal immigrants too poor, confused, or afraid to capitalize on its one-time offer. When the program kicked off last May, immigration officials predicted that between 2 million and 3.9 million people would register. But as March began only a million had come forward, and head-counters have consistently deflated their final prediction, which has now sagged to only 1.35 million. To spur a last-minute surge, sombrero-topped immigration officials have been Texas two-stepping from one photo op to another, broadcasting Spanish jingles and attending burrito bakes. They've even begun placing flyers in the bags of tortillas sold in grocery stores, urging people to apply. But all the salsa in San Diego won't coax forth the number of illegals the law was intended to help.

Rep. Charles Schumer wants to buy more time and has asked Congress to extend the deadline for a year. But judged by the contentiousness that accompanied the original act, that may be a hard sell. Congress spent five years cussing over what finally passed in 1986 as the Simpson-Rodino act. The legislation, which passed the House by seven slim votes, tread a narrow path between warring camps. It promised to get tough on new border-crossers by fining employers who hire them. At the same time, it promised to ease up on those who arrived before 1982 by offering legal status. The effort to extend the deadline is made even more difficult by the opposition of Sen. Alan Simpson, the act's cosponsor and a pivotal immigration player.

Supporters of the Schumer extension argue that an extra year's time could coax forth another 400,000 people from the shadows of illegal life. It's not just a humanitarian move on behalf of an easily exploited population, they say, but one essential to a healthy democracy. Illegal aliens are afraid to report crimes or fires. They're afraid to seek treatment for diseases. The persistence of a vulnerable subclass hurts us all. You know the retort: We gave them their chance; if they haven't registered by now, that's their problem. "Instead of being thanked for an act of beneficence, we're hearing the whining of the ungrateful," said Patrick Burns of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, to The New York Times.

What, in fact, is the problem? Across the globe, from Krakow to Krakatowa, the victims of poverty and oppression, numbering hundreds of millions, long to live in the U.S. What keeps hundreds of thousands inside our own borders from stepping forward to fulfill the promise that brought them here in the first place?

Here's the answer: >Publicity: The first key to a successful legalization program is spreading the word. Or spreading lots of words, not just in Spanish but in Creole, Polish, Tagalog, Urdu, Chinese and dozens of other languages. As its word-spreaders, the Immigration and Naturalization Service chose The Justice Group, a consortium of three California public relations firms that bid $10.7 million to do the job. But by almost all accounts, the publicity has failed. "Seriously inadequate...a major program deficiency," is what Doris Meissner, a former INS acting commissioner, called it in a report with Demetrios Papademetriou for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "I don't think anybody thinks the INS effort has been enough," said Elizabeth Bogen, who directs the Office of Immigrant Affairs for the City of New York. In private conversation, INS officials in field offices share that assessment.

The campaign has consisted mostly of ads in newspapers and on radio and TV broadcasts, in as many as 36 different languages. As a result...