Immigrants

The lanky 19-year-old from South Korea has lived in the Southland since he was 9 years old. He is as comfortable speaking English as his native Korean. And he desperately wants to join the Army. Late last week, the teenager walked into a recruiting office in an Eagle Rock mall wearing a pendant shaped like a dog tag around his neck. Until recently, local recruiters would have had to turn him away. His student visa would not have qualified him to enlist.

Looking more like a student than a soldier, the young Indian in jeans and a T-shirt snapped his heels together and stood at attention in front of an American flag. He raised his right hand and pledged to defend the United States against all enemies. The enlistment ceremony earlier this month at a military center near Los Angeles International Airport took less than five minutes. With that, he became the 101st person in Los Angeles to join the Army under a program that significantly increases the number of immigrants eligible to serve.

Samuel Kanwea showed up for what should have been his freshman year in high school illiterate, malnourished and exhausted from years of living in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast. His family had never been able to afford the luxury of education, so he spent his early teenage years collecting firewood and selling fish. When the Liberian refugee started school in Oakland at the age of 17, it was the first time he had stepped foot in a classroom. "Everyone was speaking English and it confused me," said Kanwea, a lanky student with a wide smile.

At Angel Island Immigration Station, the walls really can talk. Until now, though, they haven't told the whole story of this notorious West Coast entry point in the heart of San Francisco Bay. Their first words were in Chinese, stately poems of longing and revenge carved into the wooden barracks by desperate detainees between 1910 and 1940 and discovered by accident more than a generation later. "Sadness," wrote one anonymous poet, "kills the person in the wooden building."

Historical government files that chronicle the lives of immigrants in the U.S. will become part of the National Archives instead of being destroyed, officials announced Wednesday. The files could reveal the untold stories of millions of immigrants, including scores of Jews who fled Europe after World War II and Chinese who came to the U.S. as part of the diaspora.

The cancer-stricken father of a U.S. Marine serving in Afghanistan was arrested at his Florida home last week and is scheduled for deportation to his native Hungary. The detention of Janos Lutz, 53, has outraged his family, including his son, Pfc. Janos V. "Johnny" Lutz, a machine-gunner serving in Helmand province. "We are out here fighting . . . and I find out the United States of America is deporting my dad?" Lutz, 21, said Thursday in a telephone interview from Afghanistan.

A leading California foundation plans today to announce a broad campaign to help Los Angeles immigrants become more active citizens with a new $3.75-million, five-year program to help them learn English, improve job skills and increase civic participation. The California Community Foundation in Los Angeles also is set to release a 75-page report that documents the essential and dynamic role immigrants play in the regional economy and suggests ways to help them become even more productive.

Marine Lance Cpl. Jose Gutierrez was an orphan who made his way to the U.S. from the streets of Guatemala City as a teen. Army Sgt. 1st Class Tung Nguyen, born in Vietnam, was 11 and living in a refugee camp in Thailand when his mother placed him on a rickety boat with the goal of reaching America. Of the nearly 500 Californians who have lost their lives in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least 59 were immigrants, The Times has found in an analysis of their obituaries. Dozens more were first-generation Americans whose parents made their way to the U.S. from China, Mexico, Central America, Russia and elsewhere to seek a better life.

After completing a freshman seminar about immigration in New York, Anita Sonawane, a brainy undergraduate who happens to be a New York immigrant, had a transformative aha moment. It was something the professor said. "Oh, come on, Anita, you know you're not going to be a doctor," Jeff Maskovsky, an urban studies professor at Queens College, told her, hoping to challenge the idea that the only way to succeed in America was to practice medicine.

More than three decades of rapid growth in the country's foreign-born population came to a halt last year, census data show, as surging unemployment made the U.S. economy less attractive to outsiders. In California, which has a long history of attracting immigrants, the number of foreign-born residents actually declined, shrinking 1.6%. "This is clearly a consequence of the economy, with the biggest impact on Mexican and low-skilled immigrants," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the census figures, which are to be officially released today.