California Immigration

Bolstered resources, administrative efficiencies and diminishing demand have allowed the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Los Angeles to chip away at the nation's largest backlog of citizenship applicants, top INS officials said yesterday. "We are on the road to improvement," said INS Commissioner Doris Meissner during a visit to the agency headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.

Since he left Mexico City 21 years ago, Ernesto Barajas has never looked back on his decision to make the United States his home. On Tuesday, he made it official. Flanked by his beaming family, Barajas joined about 2,700 other immigrants at the Sequoia Conference Center in Buena Park for the final citizenship ceremony of the year. Amid a sea of fluttering U.S. flags, cries of delight heralded the pronouncement that the audience members were now U.S. citizens.

A curious little mystery has cropped up at the U.S.-Mexican border. Or more precisely, under it. This subterranean puzzler revolves around assertions that immigrant smugglers have been using a closed "narco-tunnel" that was dug about five years ago by drug traffickers seeking to sneak contraband to the U.S. side. U.S. Border Patrol agents say they have evidence that smugglers have reopened the quarter-mile tunnel, which pops to the surface on the U.S.

The mystery of the tunnel beneath the U.S.-Mexico border has apparently been solved, with officials of both countries feeling vindicated. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials Tuesday said three small "feeder" tunnels, all on the American side, were discovered leading to the quarter-mile tunnel. When the Border Patrol a week ago told of catching illegal immigrants after they emerged from the tunnel, Mexico said the opening on its side was not used as an entry.

Human rights activists and church leaders assailed government policies on both sides of the U.S-Mexico border Monday during a Day of the Dead remembrance for undocumented migrants who have died entering California in defiance of a 4-year-old U.S. crackdown on illegal crossings.

A controversial billboard on the California-Arizona border that called California "The Illegal Immigration State" was taken down Friday after the landowner became worried about his family's safety because so many motorists were stopping to photograph and gawk at the sign. It is the second billboard with the same message to be removed. The billboard was put up a week ago with funds from the Orange County-based California Coalition for Immigration Reform.

The complex process by which immigrants become U.S. citizens has virtually come full circle during the 1990s. The system careened wildly from a moderate demand early in the decade to unprecedented numbers of new citizens in the mid-1990s to what is now a record backlog of almost 2 million people nationwide on the new-citizen waiting list. One-quarter of them are in Southern California.

After an official visit to California recently, Jesus Reyes Heroles, the new Mexican ambassador, reached a startling conclusion: The more Californians and Mexicans trade with each other, the less they seem to know about each other. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement ended almost all tariffs between the United States and Mexico in 1993, California exports to Mexico have almost doubled. Only Texas exports more to Mexico. California-Mexico trade is now $25 billion a year.

The fields of wheat and alfalfa here are the new front in a border battle once centered comfortably far off in urban San Diego. Midnight quiet is splintered by Border Patrol helicopters spotlighting undocumented immigrants who've made a pedestrian highway of the irrigated rows below. A game of cat and mouse plays out in the tiny downtown: Crossers eye agents through the shabby border fence and dash into backyards on the U.S. side, a mere football's toss away.

Under other circumstances, they might be tips from the local hiking club: Wear protective clothing, carry water, don't forget your hat. But these advisories are from the U.S. Border Patrol, telling illegal immigrants how to stay alive. Crackdowns at the border, from San Diego to Yuma, Ariz., are forcing thousands of immigrants into the deserts of California--where agents are sparse but danger abounds. This arid land is a deadly welcome mat. Normal summer temperatures steam past 120 degrees.