Earnest illegal immigrants deserve a path to citizenship In 1987, I started the Fund for New Americans at the California Community Foundation with the help of the Hilton, Irvine and Weingart foundations. The fund's purpose was to provide loans and services to illegal immigrants in Southern California who were seeking amnesty under provisions of President Reagan's Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. When Reagan signed the act into law, the word "amnesty" hadn't taken on all the negative connotations it has today. These days, especially during campaign season, amnesty is equated with "free lunch" or "get out of jail free"; it's a word uttered only by those who oppose the concept. But 25 years ago, amnesty meant hope, dignity and a second chance for tens of thousands of Los Angeles-area residents. And in the many hours I spent observing English-as-a-second-language classes and immigration counseling sessions, what is only a nasty abstraction to many became very concrete to me. I saw the faces of amnesty, and it changed me forever. To listen to its detractors today, you'd think amnesty was a free ticket to Disneyland handed out on street corners. But in 1987, the path to citizenship was difficult to navigate and, to many, prohibitively expensive. If you had been convicted of a felony or three or more misdemeanors, you were rejected. That at least was cut and dried. A far more difficult provision of the law required you to prove you had been in continuous residency in the United States since 1981. Establishing a residency trail can be hard for any contemporary urban dweller, but for people constantly moving to follow low-paying jobs, or living hand to mouth in subsistence housing or with relatives or friends, proof of residency was arduous. Mail, rent receipts, electric bills, even grocery store and gas station receipts were used to prove that families and individuals were here continuously, albeit illegally, from some time before Jan. 1, 1982. And once the necessary paperwork was collected, there was a financial kicker. Sponsors of the act were intent on amnesty-seekers paying a price, so a nonrefundable processing fee was attached. The cost was $185 for each adult and $75 for children, up to a family total of $445. That amount is a bit stiff even today, but in 1987 the minimum wage in California was $3.35 an hour. This meant that the maximum family fee was almost one month's pay for minimum-wage earners, and for many illegal immigrants, then and now, minimum wage is more dream than reality. Working with immigration counseling centers in Pico Union and East Los Angeles and other Los Angeles agencies, the Fund for New Americans made more than 2,000 amnesty loans to almost 6,000 men, women and children. And although experts predicted that the default rate would be more than 25%, it was less than 5%, a figure that would put a smile on the face of any Beverly Hills merchant. Our borrowers often walked into the foundation offices in Mid-Wilshire clutching their monthly payment in their hands, eager to discharge their debt. They wanted to be American citizens and were willing to pay and do whatever it took. Time has revealed that some provisions of the immigration reform act were flawed. Sanctions against employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants were only partially enacted and spottily enforced. The seasonal agricultural worker program, which offered illegal farmworkers a less rigorous residency requirement, became instead a last-ditch effort to avoid deportation and was riddled with fraud. But a flawed or difficult path to citizenship is better than none, which is pretty much what we have now. Do we really think people will follow current law and go back to their country of origin for at least four years, uprooting their families and losing what little financial gains they have made, just to stand in a very uncertain line awaiting legal entrance? Are the best laws we can craft ones like Alabama's, which forces children to stay out of school lest they give away the status of their parents, which beggars businesses dependent on immigrant labor and which breaks up families? Approximately 11 million immigrants live without papers in our communities now. There's not enough money in the world to find and deport them. If the United States truly is the shining city on a hill, is it any wonder it serves as such an irresistible beacon of hope? People will continue to come here, legally or not. If you had seen the earnest faces of those struggling to become full-fledged, taxpaying citizens, as I did during the Reagan administration, it might change your definition of amnesty from an abstract dirty word to an ode sung by the better angels of our nature. Jack Shakely retired as president of the California Community Foundation in 2005.