Illegal Aliens Southern California

Consider this: Your boss tells you that the business isn't doing well and that you'll have to take a pay cut. Lots of people have faced bad news like that in this recession. But then consider that you haven't had a raise in 10 years; and in at least a few of those years, your industry was doing very well. That's the situation in which several thousand drywall workers say they find themselves.

New research is challenging long-held assumptions that most Mexican immigrants are uneducated single young male farm laborers who are working in the United States temporarily while supporting families in Mexico, according to an article in the current edition of Science magazine.

Tipsters will be rewarded for turning in immigrant smugglers and civilian pilots will hunt for stranded migrants under a border safety program to be announced today by U.S. and Mexican officials in Washington.

The land of opportunity has never held much for Silvia Alfaro. But nothing, not the poverty of farm work or the uncertainty of being an illegal immigrant, has ever shaped her life as much as Proposition 187. The Mexican native is packing her bags and returning to her home state of Oaxaca. Her two children--both of whom were born in this country and are therefore U.S. citizens--will go with her, becoming foreigners in a country they have never known.

The discovery of two battered and bleeding men, clad only in underwear and cowering in a West Covina back yard, has sparked a widespread investigation into the months-long torture and extortion of a dozen Chinese immigrants by operators of a sophisticated Southern California smuggling ring. The two men told authorities they were being held with 10 other immigrants in a home but had managed to escape by jumping from a second-story window.

Alarmed by the rising number of illegal aliens being killed by motorists on Interstate 5, human rights activists Friday called for a reduction in the speed limit in the danger zone and vowed to press government agencies to move more quickly to find solutions.

Federal agents inspecting a portable toilet being towed by a pickup truck found 17 undocumented Mexican immigrants hiding in the compartment, Border Patrol officials said Thursday. Border Patrol agents were told by a source three weeks ago that smugglers might try the novel approach. Agents had been watching for trucks hauling portable toilets when one was seen about 30 miles east of San Diego and five miles north of the Mexican border about 3 p.m. Wednesday.

An aging and rusty fishing boat crammed with 172 illegal immigrants from China living in filthy conditions was brought to a Navy base Friday, escorted by the U.S. Coast Guard. Federal health workers met the ship, the Chih Yung, at the dock at the 32nd Street Naval Station to give the immigrants medical care. The boat had been stopped by the Coast Guard three weeks ago 100 miles west of Baja California.

Three people, all believed to be illegal immigrants, were killed in two accidents within a 10-hour period as they attempted to dash across the San Diego Freeway near the San Onofre checkpoint. Illegal immigrants for years have crossed Interstate 5 north and south of the checkpoint--referred to by local authorities as "slaughter alley"--in an effort to evade the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Hoping for a last chance to qualify under the federal amnesty program, hundreds of undocumented aliens have been crowding local offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, some camping out overnight only to be turned away because of a shortage of staff to process all the cases. Although the amnesty program officially ended in May, 1988, the new rush has resulted from two lawsuits that cleared the way for an estimated 250,000 more people to qualify for permanent residency.