Survivors Get Social Security Reality Check

Before he died of cancer in Mexico three years ago last week, Tomas Garcia Acosta reassured his wife about her future.

“When I’m gone,” he told Antonia, “you’ll be able to collect a Social Security check too. My benefits will pass on to you.”

That was the extent of his humble estate planning. He didn’t have much wealth to show for his four decades of farm labor in the fields and orchards of California, except his calloused, leathery hands. Saving was out of the question for a man who made $250 per week pruning peach trees and picking almonds.

But just as he had faithfully sent money home to his wife and 10 daughters, this lifelong migrant worker had steadily paid into the U.S. Social Security retirement fund set up in his name.

He died believing that he had reserved a tiny slice of American security for his wife, who had never left their home in the coastal town with the gilded name: El Dorado, Sinaloa.

What he didn’t foresee was the maze of laws and confounding exceptions that would prevent his widow from collecting her benefits. Instead of security, Garcia had unwittingly left behind uncertainty and headaches for his family.

In his waning years, Garcia--a legal U.S. resident--had his modest Social Security checks mailed to his hometown, where he retired. Not that he could enjoy his golden years in El Dorado. His illness had forced doctors to amputate one leg piece by piece, from his toe to his thigh.

He made a point of warning his family not to keep his Social Security checks after he was gone. So when the payment arrived as usual after his death, his family sent it back.

That would be the last monthly payment they would see.

Antonia couldn’t decipher the official letters from America telling her what she needed to do to collect her payments. Her daughters paid to have them translated and that just made misunderstandings worse.

I’ve spent hours trying to find out why Antonia still isn’t getting her benefits after three years of waiting. Unlike her, I had help from two accommodating Social Security spokesmen in Santa Ana and Baltimore.

And still I struggled to understand how the law works. Trust me, it’s not easy to grasp the logic.

I learned, for example, that if Antonia were a citizen of Israel or Japan, she would be getting her survivor benefits with no questions asked.

Why? Because the United States has special friendship treaties with those two allies. We treat their citizens exactly as if they were U.S. citizens when it comes to Social Security matters.

Citizens from Canada and 16 European nations also get special breaks as a result of mutual social security agreements. They are exempted, to begin with, from meeting a residency requirement imposed on the rest of the world.

In most countries, collecting survivor benefits gets complicated. Survivors must show they lived with their wage-earning spouses in the United States for at least five years before they can have checks mailed to their home countries. In Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia or Vietnam, survivors can’t collect at all.

In Antonia’s case, she would have to jump through hoop after hoop to get her checks mailed to Mexico because she never lived in the United States with her husband. In the end, as I discovered, the requirements would tax her health and drain the small retirement benefit.

In August of 1996, the Social Security Administration wrote to Antonia to say “we have approved your application for widow’s benefits.” Starting rate: $364.50 a month. That’s a handsome sum for a Mexican widow who used to bake bread and do laundry to make ends meet while her husband was away working.

Antonia, 68, currently lives in the house her husband had built in the neighborhood appropriately called La Huertita, the Little Orchard. She’s supported by two unmarried daughters, a nurse and a teacher, who live with her.

Her youngest girl, Petra, started peddling her mom’s bread on the streets of town when she was 7. She’s now 28 and earns about 2,000 pesos per month at a private kindergarten. That’s slightly more than 200 U.S. dollars, and her sister doesn’t make much more as a nurse.

Small retirement checks look bigger south of the border.

With her eligibility letter, Antonia also received a brochure explaining some of the requirements she had to meet to collect her benefits. They paid a local English teacher 50 pesos to have the complex information translated--roughly.

Here’s how Petra summarized in Spanish what they thought the U.S. government was trying to tell them: “Your presence is requested in the United States to activate your claim for benefits.”

There’s a lot more to it than that. But armed with the government’s “invitation,” Petra and her mother headed off for a grueling ground trip to Hermosillo to request a visa at the American consulate.

They traveled 12 hours by bus, stopping in every Godforsaken village along the way. They arrived at 3 in the morning, took a cab straight to the consulate and got in line before dawn with dozens already there.

The office opened at 8 and they had their answer before noon: Visa denied. Antonia says a consular official at the window didn’t even bother to review the Social Security documents she brought to support her application.

Mother and daughter had lunch and immediately caught a bus for the 12-hour trip home. Standing and sitting so long had impaired Antonia’s circulation. Her feet were swollen, she caught a cold and ran a fever.

“It didn’t go too well for us,” said Petra.

After that, Antonia told her daughters to just drop it.

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” she said using a typical Mexican expression of resignation. “Ni modo.”

When I tried to contact Antonia this week, I discovered her phone had been temporarily disconnected for nonpayment. Another daughter who lives nearby had to go get her so we could talk.

“Ya estoy viejita,” Antonia said. “I’m a little old lady now, and I could use a little help. My two daughters will be getting married soon and I’ll be left alone. Life here is very hard. Everything goes up except salaries.”

Her daughters haven’t given up, though. In February, Angelina, the nurse, came to Santa Ana to visit the clan’s oldest sister, Ramona, the only one living in the United States. She brought the latest letters from Social Security and asked her to make one last attempt.

Ramona contacted Raoul Silva, an immigration consultant and onetime aide to Bob Dornan, the former congressman. Silva knows how quickly federal agencies react in response to inquiries from Washington officials. So he contacted his buddy, Alberto Sandoval, an aide to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.

Sandoval says he wrote to consular authorities in Hermosillo on March 8 to inquire about Antonia’s visa application. He’s waiting to hear back.

“I don’t know what’s happening, but they may be able to do something so she can get her Social Security check,” said Sandoval, who also once worked for Dornan, bird-dogging immigration cases.

But Antonia will need to do more than just get into the country to start her monthly payments, raised to $477 in 1997. She’ll have to keep coming back if she wants to keep the checks coming.

First, she has to live here legally for a full calendar month. Not 30 days, mind you. A calendar month. That could be 29 days if you pick February in a leap year. When and if she returns home, she must not remain in Mexico for more than six months.

One way to keep the clock from running out: Come back to the United States one day per month and report in with the nice folks at Social Security. Then she can have her benefits mailed to El Dorado as long as she lives.

Phew! That’s enough to make you wish you were Japanese.

Antonia did qualify for Medicare benefits. The government sent her a list of hospitals where she could get treatment. Only problem is, they’re all inside the country that won’t let her in.

“We all laughed,” said Petra about the medical benefits. “What good is this to us?”

Agustin Gurza’s column appears Tuesday and Saturday. Readers can reach Gurza at (714) 966-7712 or [email protected].