refugees for moral and religious reasons,
despite the threat of fines and imprison-
ment. The U.S. government successfully
prosecuted some leaders of the sanctuary
movement but, due to public opposition
to U.S. policy in Central America, found
it politically inadvisable to punish them to
the full extent of the law or to prosecute
all the cases it might have.
The end of the civil wars in the
1990s brought a decrease in the number
of new refugees from Central America
but also made it more difficult for
Central American refugees whose cases
were still pending to win political asylum.
A 1996 law tightened an avenue for gain-
ing legal status, one that required appli-
cants to show only that they had resided
in the United States for several years
and that leaving the country would con-
stitute an extreme hardship. According to
the Illegal Immigration Reform and
Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, a
maximum of 1,000 aliens per fiscal year
could be granted asylum by the United
States or admitted as refugees. The law
also provided for a new category of
immigration status known as “withhold-
ing of removal,” available to refugees in
the United States who could show a
likelihood that their lives or freedom
would be threatened if they were
returned to their country of origin.
However, the rules governing withhold-
ing of removal required applicants to
prove that it was more likely thannot that they would be persecuted—
again, a difficult or impossible condition
to prove. Therefore, the ultimate legal
status of many refugees of Central
America’s civil wars remained uncertain
by the close of the 20th century.
The largest community of Central
Americans in the United States was in
Los Angeles, where about 350,000
Salvadorans and 110,000 Guatemalans
lived as of 1990. The Pico-Union section
of Los Angeles had a particularly large
concentration of Central American immi-
grants. New York and Florida also had
large Central American populations, each
numbering between 100,000 and
500,000; Texas, Illinois, Virginia,
Maryland, and New Jersey each had
25,000 to 100,000 Central Americans.
Many Central Americans in the
United States held blue-collar jobs in
manufacturing, agriculture, construction,
restaurants, and domestic work. Some
others worked in white-collar, middle-
class professional careers. Nicaraguans
who fled their country after Somoza’s
overthrow were especially affluent, much
like the Cuban exiles who initially fled
Castro. Many Nicaraguans settled in
Miami, where they could commiserate
with Cuban exiles who shared their anti-
communist sentiment and helped pro-
cure aid for them. By 2000 Miami’s
Nicaraguan community was populous
enough that one area of the city was
known as Little Managua.212 ATLAS OF HISPANIC-AMERICAN HISTORY
Central American Population Distribution, 1999