Children Left Behind Sadden Aliens Who Can Live Here

Rebecca Villalpanda is sitting on the bed because I have taken the small couch, which is upholstered in a knobby plaid.

This room, with its kitchenette and bathroom, fronting one of Santa Ana’s main thoroughfares, is her family’s home. A used car lot is next door, on the other side a liquor store, beauty parlor and a shop that repairs shoes--while you wait.

Engine noise, from cars and delivery trucks, threads through our conversation. Our voices, in Spanish, adjust.

The baby, Humberto Landin, 7 months old, named after his father, manages to sleep. His crib is pressed against the window. He is wearing a knit hat.

“One has to think that one is strong,” Rebecca, who is 30 years old, tells me. “I have learned to work. It has given me worth. When one has few options, why be afraid?”

Rebecca Villalpanda and her husband, both of them Mexican by birth, are getting by, with hope of really getting ahead, setting an example that would make the Immigration and Naturalization Service proud.

Humberto takes home about $375 a week from his factory job--which for three months has transplanted him to San Jose--and Rebecca, $190, after a 48-hour week tending the cash register at a local bar. Rent here is $500 a month, and the baby-sitter charges $60 a week.

The INS has already accepted the couple’s applications for amnesty--Humberto has been here for 11 years and Rebecca for eight--and their baby, by birthright, is a U.S. citizen.

But there is an irony here, harsh and double-edged, that is shared by thousands of immigrants hoping for a better way. For Rebecca and her husband, success has a taste that is bittersweet.

Rebecca’s children from an earlier marriage, Miguel Angel and Karina, 14 and 10, have been left in Mexico with their grandmother. Their father abandoned them long ago.

Now, however, their mother’s earnings are giving them a glimpse at a future that was never Rebecca’s to behold. The separation, Rebecca says, is for their own good.

Both children are in school, with enough to eat, and Miguel Angel has begun attending computer classes in the afternoons.

“Here, in a week, I earn what it took me two months to get in Mexico,” Rebecca says. “Yes, I’d like to return. Who wouldn’t like to return to the land that is theirs? But it is so, so hard. There is no work in Mexico, and what there is pays so little.”

So Rebecca sees her children for two weeks, taking an unpaid vacation to her mother’s home in Celaya, Guanajuato, once every two years. Her most recent trip was last month.

“My children say to me, ‘Please, please, stay with us,’ ” Rebecca says. “They don’t care where we are, just that we are together. I feel so bad, but there are times, because of need, that one has to go. . . . When I leave, of course, there are always tears. Who is not going to cry?”

This past Valentine’s Day, the INS put into effect a new directive, one that the agency calls its family fairness policy.

What the policy says is that spouses and minor, unmarried children of immigrants who have been accepted into the amnesty program may be allowed to stay in the United States without fear of deportation. There are, however, several requirements to be met.

These spouses and children, for example, must have been living continuously with the amnesty applicant since before Nov. 7, 1986, the day the Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed. And the agency says it will review each application individually. Permission must be renewed yearly.

Verne Jervis, an INS spokesman in Washington, tells me that hundreds of thousands of immigrants may qualify for this temporary legal status under the new family fairness policy, which, in the best government tradition, was also the name of the old policy, the one that specifically excluded these same people.

Jervis says the new INS national commissioner, Gene McNary, changed the rules because he thought it was the fair thing to do and because many people had suggested as much.

“Fairness is in the eyes of the beholder, like beauty and a lot of other things,” Verne Jervis says.

Rebecca’s children, of course, do not qualify under the family policy. Nor do dependants of many other immigrants whose stories I have heard.

The wife of one Santa Ana amnesty applicant, for example, has traveled frequently between the United States and Mexico, where the couple’s children have been left behind. Neither she, because of her failure to live “continuously” in the United States, nor her children, need apply.

There are bills pending in Congress that aim to correct some of the many inequities in the nation’s immigration laws. Perhaps a new law can shorten the wait for a resident’s visa, which in the case of Mexicans takes an average of 10 to 12 years, or maybe the annual worldwide quota of 270,000 immigrants will grow.

Nothing is planned, however, to accommodate the dependants of amnesty applicants, such as Rebecca, because the INS decided that it had to draw a line.

“It would be an open invitation for additional people to come into the country,” Verne Jervis says.

I understand about drawing lines and the difficulties of making rules that will never please everyone involved. And formulating immigration policy is surely one of the stickiest endeavors around.

But our government has told amnesty applicants that if they meet certain conditions, they have a right to stay. What they don’t have, apparently, is a right to have their family in their new home.

In the eye of this beholder, that is simply not fair.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.