La vida Utah: Legal or illegal — status is problem

Manuel is not so different than other 19-year-old high school graduates. He works two jobs, scrimping and saving enough for college that someday, he hopes, will lead to a lucrative career.

A talented artist, Manuel wants to be a graphic designer.

But while Manuel keeps one eye focused on waiting tables at a posh local club, the other watches the door, haunted by the thought that today might be the day his world comes crashing down.

"It could happen today, it could happen tomorrow," he shrugs.

That's because Manuel, a Utah resident since he was 10 and an honors graduate of Granite High School, is an illegal resident of the United States. One misstep, one traffic stop, one employer suspicious about his lack of a Social Security number — any of these could result in his deportation to Mexico, the country of his birth but little more.

"There is nothing for me in Mexico," he said. "My family is here and my friends are here."

When Manuel talked with an attorney to resolve his residence status, he was informed he really has only three options: He could go back to Mexico and apply for U.S. resident status, which could take up to 10 years. He could apply for a student visa and then go back to Mexico after four or five years in college. Or he could marry an American citizen.

"All three are off limits as far as I am concerned," he said.

These are also unrealistic options for the 50,000 to 100,000 Hispanics now living in Utah illegally. Most find themselves working menial jobs for minimal pay, part of a shadowy subculture fraught with abuse and destitute of any real hope.

American citizenship remains but an elusive pipedream for most, and without it most will remain forgotten by a system that ignores them as law-breakers, as illegals.

"To the system, I am a nobody," Manuel said. "They don't even know my name."

Illegal Justice

Manuel has it better than most caught in this bureaucratic limbo. His fluency in English deflects suspicion, and with an economy in desperate need of bilingual workers he has always been able to find employers who will overlook his lack of documentation.

For now.

Mike Martinez, a civil rights attorney and advocate for Utah Hispanics, says Manuel's situation is hardly unique. In fact, the nation's long-standing immigration policy has created "a problem no one ever anticipated."

"We have had, over the years, a lot of people who are undocumented who are clearly illegal and deportable," he said. But these immigrant workers have managed to elude the system, in the process raising families, sending their children to public schools and watching their English-speaking children embrace everything from Teletubbies to American football.

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