THE BORDER OF HOPE AND FEAR

By LINDSAY PETERSON lpeterson@tampatrib.com

Published: Apr 9, 2005

DADE CITY - The people hollered "Freedom ... freedom now." They waved signs: "All we want to do is work," and "We are not terrorists."

Alejandro Gaxiola stood silently among them, a serious-looking 17-year-old letting the American flag in his hands speak for him. At 10, Alejandro crawled under a fence with his family to get into the United States from Mexico.

He has followed the debate in Congress over a new immigration bill, and he knows that when some people look at him they see an invader. But to Margarita Romo, an advocate who organized the Dade City rally for immigrants' rights, Alejandro is a child who deserves a chance.

Twenty years ago, she brought another undocumented 17-year-old under her wing, giving the girl, Araceli Corona, work in her nonprofit organization and helping Araceli eventually leave the fields.

Alejandro is much like Araceli. Both were about 10 when they came to Dade City. Both were born to parents who wanted more for their children than a subsistence life in Mexico.

But they came here at starkly different times for the United States, their lives tracing the changes in the country and its attitudes toward undocumented immigrants.

In December, the U.S. House passed a bill that would make felons of undocumented immigrants and people who help them. U.S. senators, under pressure from immigration groups, crafted a bill last week offering legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants while also increasing border security. It failed on Friday. But advocates said they will press hard for senators to revisit the issue after their two-week recess.

Twenty years ago, Congress passed another immigration bill, when Araceli was 17. It strengthened border forces and made it a crime, for the first time, to hire an undocumented immigrant. But to most of the undocumented workers already here it offered a gift: amnesty.

More than 2.5 million people won the right to stay. For Araceli and her family, it meant freedom from the fields, from years of toil, low wages and fear. Working for a lawyer in Dade City today, she is a U.S. citizen and the mother of two children she is determined to send to college. One sister is the assistant to the provost at Pasco-Hernando Community College; two brothers are poultry farm managers.

"The amnesty changed our lives," Araceli's mother, Felipa Montoya, said at a recent family gathering. She gestured to a roomful of her grandchildren, 2 months to 14 years old. "All of these kids are U.S. citizens, and they are going to have a better future. … They will be someone."

Alejandro's prospects are less clear. If Congress fails to provide a way for undocumented immigrants to gain residency, Alejandro faces a rocky future - as do the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. An undocumented life means low-wage jobs, limited opportunity for higher education and a constant fear of deportation.

Up to 1 million of these immigrants live in Florida. They clean toilets in Clearwater beachfront hotels, pour concrete for new houses in Bradenton and pick strawberries in Plant City.

They work among us and shop among us. Their children sit next to ours in school. Although many elected officials say it's time to bring them into the open, others denounce the approach of 20 years ago.

It would reward the illegal border crossers and entice others to try to follow, creating more competition for low-skill jobs that millions of Americans need and running up school and hospital costs, critics say.

They utter "amnesty" like it's a dirty word.

In 1980, six out of every 100 people in the United States were born in another country. Beyond the border states, they were almost invisible. About 1 in 100 were thought to be undocumented. Spending on the border patrol was less than $200 million.

Crowded into their station wagon, Araceli's family approached the immigration checkpoint.

They had used short-term transit passes to get through the first, where Mexico becomes the United States at Brownsville, Texas. But the permits were good only within a few miles of the border.

At 33, with six children younger than 16, Araceli's father, Fortino Montoya, had worked 15 years for a corn farmer, driving a tractor nearly every day. Realizing he would probably drive a tractor until he died, he and his wife, Felipa, decided in 1980 that it was time to go.

The family packed some clothes, blankets, a small stove and Felipa's molcajete, a stone device for grinding spices.

When they reached the second checkpoint, outside Brownsville, they came face to face with an agent who seemed to know their intentions.

According to the story told among the family over the years, the agent looked over the loaded station wagon, put his head in the window and asked the Montoyas why they were in the United States.

Felipa answered firmly, "We're going to Florida. We want to work."

The official, a young Hispanic man, paused and smiled. "You're lucky you got me," he said in Spanish. "I'll let you go, but the next guy might not be like me."

They drove on, straight through to Dade City, where people the Montoyas knew had found work in the orange groves and tomato fields.

To Araceli and her family, "The U.S. was a big country, and you could make a lot of money here," Araceli said. They wound up in a rundown wooden house where mice peered at them through holes in the wall. Felipa missed the neat, concrete home she left behind. But she believed hard work would get them something better.

The stress of that hard work intensified in the mid-1980s. Congress began seriously debating an amnesty program, and border patrol agents started cruising the roads crisscrossing Florida's fields.

The family would hear them before they saw them, flinching at the sound of a motor, a door slamming. "Act like nothing is happening," Felipa would tell the children who worked alongside her during weekends and summers. "Just keep working." But when other workers started running, they ran, too.

Felipa had a miscarriage when Araceli was about 14. It was a high-risk pregnancy, Araceli said. "But she would not stay home. She was afraid they'd come to the field and take one of us, and we'd be separated."

Still the Montoyas weren't tempted to go home, where the economic news had gotten worse. In 1982, investor panic over Mexico's debt caused the peso to crash. The pain deepened as the government shed workers and ended subsidies to private businesses and consumers.

Also, the family was hearing more about the coming law and a promise of green cards. When Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, people lined up at Romo's Farmworkers Self-Help office to file their applications. Farmworkers were required to show only that they had worked in agriculture for 90 days the previous year. Others had to show they had lived in the United States since 1982.

By 1990, all the Montoyas had their green cards. Felipa remembers standing outside a store one afternoon, hearing an airplane and looking up; the border patrol often used planes. "Are you scared?" a woman asked. "No," Felipa answered. "I'm not afraid anymore. I have my papers."

Soon her husband found a full-time maintenance job at a poultry farm outside Dade City. They had health insurance for the first time, so Felipa could leave the fields. The couple transferred their house into their names from a relative with citizenship who held the deed.

They felt safe. "Without a green card, you're always in fear," Araceli said. "But at least with the card you feel like you can work, you feel like you can talk. … You have an identity and rights."

The 2.5 million people who obtained their green cards through the 1986 law were earning, on average, 14 percent more by 1991. A third of them had become U.S. citizens.

The friends, relatives and others who heard of their success flowed from Mexico. The numbers of undocumented immigrants dropped soon after the law was passed, then headed back up. One reason, researchers speculate, is that people were waiting to see whether the government would enforce the rules against hiring undocumented immigrants. It didn't.

By 1990, about 8 in 100 people in the United States had been born in another country. About 1 in 100 were thought to be undocumented, but the number was rising. So was the border patrol budget, which had more than tripled in 10 years, to about $700 million.

Alejandro got his first taste of how people felt about Mexicans when he was 5, about 1994. He was playing outside his family's apartment in Houston. He recalls hearing, "Go jump the little beaner," then being pushed and slapped and called a wetback before the group let him run away. He was so upset when he got home, he couldn't speak.

About three years earlier he had come to the United States from Mexico, where full-time jobs had become scarce and people peddled whatever they could on the street and from their living rooms. Credit for home buying and business formation was practically nonexistent.

In California, then Texas, his father worked as a janitor and sewed clothes at a factory. He hoped to earn enough to go back to Mexico and start a business.

The family returned to Mexico about 1995, to the state of Sonora. Alejandro's father found work in a restaurant, but the economy had worsened after another peso crash the year before. When Alejandro's 2-year-old brother, Luis, contracted an eye disease, there wasn't enough to pay a doctor.

Across the border, the U.S. economy was creating tens of thousands of jobs for people just like Alejandro's father, those lacking higher degrees and willing to work for less than most U.S. residents.

They had branched way beyond farm work. People from Mexico and other Latin American countries were in Iowa meat-packing plants, Georgia carpet mills and Florida landscape nurseries.

In 1999, Alejandro made his second crossing with his family. He remembers running through the desert at night toward an American flag lit in the distance, across the Arizona border. He remembers scurrying under a fence with about 20 others, frightened and excited.

"It was very organized, very quiet, very fast," he said.

From 1980 to 2000, the proportion of people in the United States born in another country nearly doubled to 11 for every 100 people. The proportion of undocumented immigrants tripled, to 3 in every 100, many of them not border crossers but people with expired visas. Spending at the border was nearly $2.5 billion, an increase of more than 1100 percent.

Alejandro saw the two men together on television. They were the presidents of Mexico and the United States, his father told him. Everyone in town was talking about it.

Two years earlier, searching for steady work in a quiet place, Alejandro's parents had brought him and his two brothers to Dade City, a town surrounded by farms, somewhat insulated from the hostility building toward immigrants.

It was the fall of 2001 and presidents Bush and Vicente Fox were on Spanish-language television, talking about their plans to allow some undocumented immigrants to get work permits.

"I thought we might become documented. Our hopes were higher than they had ever been," Alejandro said.

Six days later, on Sept. 11, terrorists attacked New York and Washington. Relaxing immigration rules became politically indefensible. Border control became a national security issue.

To Alejandro, "all was lost."

In the next couple of years, as Alejandro moved into adolescence, he quit studying, began acting up in school, then skipped his classes altogether.

"I felt angry over everything," Alejandro said. "I felt pushed down, and I made it worse. I dug a hole for myself. I was digging and digging and digging, and when I looked up, there was hardly any light."

Romo, the farmworker advocate, would see him in their Dade City neighborhood, a ragged, depressed place of unpaved, unlighted streets. She knew he was in trouble. But as she had seen the spark in Araceli, Romo also saw promise in Alejandro.

She encouraged him to come to evening sessions at the Farmworkers Self-Help Learning Center, where teenagers study and talk about what they want to do after high school.

Finally she went to his house. "What are you doing? Can't you see how hard your parents work for you?" she asked.

Then one evening, he ambled through the center's doors.

He lends a hand at the learning center these days, between his classes at Wesley Chapel High School. On Thursday evenings, he helps adult immigrants who come to the center to learn English.

Last month she took him with her and other farmworker advocates to the Tampa offices of Florida's U.S. senators, Bill Nelson and Mel Martinez.

He stood quietly in the corner of Nelson's office, listening to the farmworker advocates talk about why immigrants come here. Finally Romo asked whether he had anything to say.

He did. He took a deep breath.

"They invest in us from pre-K to high school, and after high school we are not able to go to college," he said softly. "Even if some of the kids are gifted and they've been here almost all their life, they can't go because they have to pay out-of-state tuition. But even if they could, after college they can't get work in the business world, so the investment taxpayers made is lost."

He's not surprised by the people in Congress who want him and others to go back to Mexico, he said. "The people that are doing this have wanted to do this for a long time. … They say this country is going to be overrun by little beaners.

"I know my people have done bad things. But that's all some people see. They don't see the good deeds we do."

Araceli remembers the feeling. Nearly every day in her work at the law office, she sees the effects of tougher government rules.

If one spouse has a green card and the other doesn't, the undocumented spouse often must go back to his native country to apply for residency, then faces a 10-year wait.

"These are people with children," she said. "They come to my office crying."

People call asking how to get work visas for their employees. "There's nothing," she said. "The way things are now, with the waiting lists, there's nothing anyone can do."

People talk about going back, Romo said. But in many places, there's nothing for them to go back to, no jobs, no opportunity, she said. Some people left at such a young age, they've forgotten how to read and write in Spanish.

"They have no future there … but here the politicians want to kick them out," Romo said.

"These people are stuck in limbo. They can't go forward and they can't go back."

RISING WAVE

* 4.4 million of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States arrived after 2000. An estimated 400,000 are coming in every year.

When they arrived

In millions

1980S: 1.8

1990-94: 2

1995-99: 2.9

2000-05: 4.4

* After reaching a high of 9 million in the first decade of the 20th century, immigration fell until the 1950s. After that, the number of legal admissions and undocumented immigrants began a steady climb, which is projected to continue to a 2001-10 total of nearly 16 million.

In millions

Legal admissions Undocumented immigrants

1961-1970: 3.3 .5

1971-1980: 4.5 2.5

1981-1990: 6 4

1991-2000: 7.8 6.2

2001-2010: 9.4 6.5

Tribune graphic; Source: Pew Hispanic Center

2 SIDES OF IMMIGRATION DEBATE

Two families leave Mexico seeking a better life in the United States. Both end up in Pasco County.

In 25 years, the number of Mexicans moving to the United States explodes. So does the amount of money spent patrolling the border.

1980

Araceli Corona, then 10, and her family cross the border and head to Dade City to work in the fields.

Roughly 2.5 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States. The country spends less than $200 million to patrol the Mexican border.

1982

A Mexican debt crisis causes the peso to plummet, and Mexico begins a series of economic changes, lowering tariffs, privatizing state enterprises and phasing out subsidies to Mexican companies and consumers. Unemployment begins to rise.

1986

With the number of undocumented immigrants up to roughly 4 million, Congress passes the Immigration Reform and Control Act. It enables about 2.5 million immigrants to become legal permanent residents and obtain green cards. It also makes it a crime for an employer to knowingly hire an undocumented immigrant.

1988

Araceli, who has applied for a green card, graduates from high school.

The number of undocumented immigrants drops to roughly 1.5 million.

1989

Alejandro Gaxiola is born in Culican, in northwestern Mexico. The year before, his father had left Mexico to find work in California, returning in 1990 to get his wife, Alejandro and another son.

1990

Spending to patrol the U.S. border with Mexico rises to about $700 million. The number of undocumented immigrants is up to roughly 3 million.

1991

Having received their green cards, Araceli and her family spend their last summer migrating with the crops. Araceli's younger sister Gabriella becomes the first in the family to attend college.

1994

Mexico continues its move toward free market economics with its entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement, opening the country to foreign imports. Advocates predict rising investment in Mexico will increase jobs and reduce immigration, but the peso collapses in another economic crisis.

1996

Alejandro and his family are not included in the U.S. illegal immigrant count, having returned to Mexico.

Congress passes two bills toughening border enforcement, making it more difficult to get a green card and barring noncitizens from receiving most federal welfare benefits. The number of undocumented immigrants in the United States rises to roughly 5 million.

1999

Alejandro and his family recross the border and head to Dade City, where his father finds work in the fields, then construction.

An estimated 8 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, as border patrol spending approaches $2.5 billion.

2001

Recently elected President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox meet to discuss a plan to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants. Six days later, terrorists attack the United States.

2005

The U.S. House passes a bill to build a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border, turn undocumented immigrants in the United States into felons and make it illegal to aid an undocumented immigrant. Roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants are in the United States.

Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834.

For more stories on the immigration debate and a Spanish version of this story, go to centrotampa.com. Para una versión en español de este artículo, y más información sobre el debate de inmigración, visite centro tampa.com

Keyword: Amnesty, to hear what Araceli Corona's family says about the impact of amnesty and immigration legislation on their lives. Also see a timeline of immigration laws.