Amnesty touches home for Bay Area Asians
About 1.5 million Chinese, Filipinos, others live here illegally -- many overstayed visas
Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Robert and Alice Liang came to the United States on vacation in 1983 and never left.
Today, they have three U.S.-born children and own a house and a bustling Chinese restaurant. They also are among up to 180,000 undocumented Asian immigrants who live in the Bay Area.
Though Asians are the second largest subgroup of illegal immigrants, they have been largely invisible in the nation's massive protests this spring against proposals to crack down on illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants from Asia mirror a cross-section of the Bay Area; in addition to house-cleaners and restaurant workers, they are small-business owners and even highly trained professionals, immigration lawyers and activists say.
Now the Liangs and others are starting to speak out and take a stand in the debate.
"I try to join, as one person," said Alice Liang, 48, who attended a demonstration April 23 in San Francisco. It was the first time either she or her hu*****and had dared to attend a public protest. But they had yong gan -- courage -- because they were united with other immigrants, they said.
"A lot of people think it's just Mexicans, no Chinese. She thinks she has to go and support this action," Robert Liang, 48, said on a recent afternoon in the dining room of their homey, 28-seat Mountain View restaurant. "If people are here a long time, paid their taxes, got a good education and are good for the community, the government has to give them this chance," he said.
Of the nation's estimated 12 million illegal migrants, about 13 percent or 1.5 million are from Asia, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated in a report released in April. Most of those 1.5 million likely are among the 25 to 40 percent of illegal immigrants that Pew estimates entered the country legally but then overstayed their visas, as the Liangs did.
The Asian Law Caucus, a San Francisco civil rights group, estimates that 80,000 to 180,000 undocumented immigrants from all across Asia live in the Bay Area, based on calculations they made using Pew, U.S. Census and federal immigration services estimates. Nationally, Chinese accounted for 23 percent of undocumented Asians, followed by Filipinos at 17 percent, Asian Indians at 14 percent and Koreans at 11 percent, according to a federal study in 2001.
The Liangs, visiting from Taiwan on tourist visas, were persuaded by friends to stay in the United States. Robert found a job at a restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown that did not ask for his paperwork, while Alice worked as a babysitter -- positions in the nation's vast underground economy, which can both shelter and trap undocumented workers. With another woman, they shared a cheap, one-room apartment in Chinatown with no bathroom or kitchen.
Eventually, using their Taiwanese passports as identification, the Liangs got Social Security cards stamped "not valid for employment" -- a designation available since 1982 for temporary legal residents, which the Liangs still were when they applied because their six-month tourist visas were still valid.
The Liangs also legally obtained driver's licenses, as anyone with identification who passed the test could do in California until 1994, when the Department of Motor Vehicles began requiring proof of birthday and legal residence in the United States. The department began collecting Social Security numbers in 1992 but did not start verifying them until 2000.
Now it is illegal for anyone living here illegally to get a driver's license, and it is a felony to use false documents to conceal citizenship status. In certain cases, renewal of a valid license does not require re-verification of legal status, so the Liangs and many other illegal immigrants have been able to renew their licenses legally, said Joren Lyons, the Liangs' lawyer and a staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus.
In 1988, using savings and investments from friends, they opened their first restaurant. (The Liangs asked that their restaurant not be identified by name in this story.)
After their first child was born in 1992, they began trying to legalize their status, but their petitions were denied. In 2003, Rep. Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., after receiving hundreds of letters of support from friends and customers of the couple, sponsored private legislation in both houses of Congress that would allow them to stay. Their deportation is delayed pending congressional votes.
Asians' lack of urgency about resolving illegal immigration may boil down the numbers: Illegal migrants account for only a little more than one-tenth of the 13 million Asians and Pacific Islanders living in the United States, based on figures from the U.S. Census and the Pew center. By contrast, undocumented immigrants constitute a quarter of Latinos.
Also important is that, unlike Spanish-language radio stations, the Bay Area's Asian media -- which include a multitude of newspapers, radio stations, magazines and television shows -- has not tried to mobilize its diverse readership and viewership, which does not share even a common language.
But Asians' interest in the issue is driven in part by how the debate has been framed, said Luna Yasui, policy director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a civil rights group.
"People have deemed it a Latino issue. That has created a misperception among Asian Pacific communities that somehow nothing is at stake," she said.
Kyung Jin Lee, immigration coordinator at the Korean Community Center of the East Bay, said many of its clients who are here illegally feel powerless, which deters them from attending protests or speaking up in some other way.
"They're hoping for the best, but they know it's out of their hands," Lee said. "There's nothing they can do as individuals. They can't go and lobby Congress."
But activists worry that major immigration concerns that can affect all Asians will go ignored unless the community can shift the debate away from a possible crackdown.
For example, naturalized Filipinos sponsoring their adult children must wait 16 years for their applications to be processed and more than 20 years for their brothers and sisters, noted Christopher Punongbayan of the Oakland rights group Filipinos for Affirmative Action. Cutting down on the wait times would cut down on illegal immigration -- and should be an important goal, he said.
"We want to maximize the legal channels of migration," Punongbayan said. "The reason why a lot of people from the Philippines or Asian countries are undocumented is because they do not have legal, permanent ways (to immigrate)."
One California Filipino family initially had hoped that its patriarch -- a World War II veteran and U.S. citizen -- could sponsor them. But he died before their paperwork could make its way up a lengthy waiting list.
"People assume they can just deport all of us. But when they deport people like my family, they deport all the contributions we've made and everything I've invested in this country," said a daughter in that family, a 25-year-old Bay Area civil rights lawyer who lives in the United States illegally and did not want to use her name for fear of repercussions for her family.
The family arrived in 1982 on visitor visas, and the daughter went on to graduate from top California universities, while her mother -- also an illegal immigrant -- is a physician who began working here after passing the U.S. medical boards.
"Undocumented immigration is not limited to a small community that can be simply relocated," she said. "It's a national concern that crosses cultural lines, class lines."
Restaurant owner Robert Liang was born in Laos to parents who had fled Vietnam during the Vietnam War. After his mother was killed in the ensuing conflict in Laos, the family fled for Taiwan via Thailand and were admitted as refugees.
"My family has escaped many countries already. In my mind, I want safety," he said. The natives in every country he has lived in have looked down upon him, he said.
"But this time, it's good for my kids. They were born here. They're American," he said.
E-mail Vanessa Hua at vahua@sfchronicle.com.
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