By Caroline Preston

With speculation growing that immigration could be the next big issue that Congress takes on, immigrants are showing up at the local Catholic Charities office in Dallas in increasing numbers asking after news of a bill and if there’s anything they can do to prepare for it.

The charity hands out a flier with a list of “10 Commandments,” steps like learning basic English, always telling the truth to public officials, and keeping children in school.

“Begin to prepare now in case there is a new immigration law in the future,” the flier says. “If you want legal residence someday, follow the 10 Commandments now.”

Yet Vanna Slaughter, director of immigration and legal services at Catholic Charities of Dallas, and other charity officials worry that it is the nonprofit groups that will be unprepared if Congress adopts legislation to create a path to legal residency for millions of undocumented immigrants.

She and many others who work with immigrants say the current system is in desperate need of changes and that new federal legislation is the only way to bring the roughly 11 million people living illegally in the United States out of the shadows.

But nonprofit officials are concerned that if a new law passes, they will not have the capacity to respond to the deluge of people who would need their assistance filling out legal paperwork, learning English, and navigating an unfamiliar federal system.

Legal groups say they would be overwhelmed by people needing help. Some of the cases would be easy to handle, but others could get snarled in confusion and disagreements over the law’s specifics.

Without enough staff members and volunteers to handle the requests, many people could fall victim to “notarios”—unscrupulous lawyers or people posing as lawyers who mishandle applications or simply steal money.

Charities that provide English-language classes already face trouble meeting demand. Sixty percent of New York grass-roots organizations in a survey last year by United Neighborhood Houses of New York said they have recently been forced to start or expand waiting lists for their classes. For example, Queens Community House, in Forest Hills, N.Y., turns away three-quarters of people who want to take English classes during peak hours.

In 2007, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that immigrants seeking legal status would need a total of 1.9 billion hours of English-language classes to meet the requirements of the immigration law introduced that year, the last time Congress considered a bill to drastically reshape immigration policy, and speak the language well enough to participate in civic life.

Strong Interest by Soros

Foundations that support immigration issues are trying to anticipate the challenges. But many say their focus now has to be on helping nonprofit groups build support for changes to the immigration system and that they can only do so much until the details of legislation are known.

In December, Illinois Congressman Luis V. Gutierrez, a Democrat, introduced an immigration bill in the House of Representatives, and Sens. Charles Schumer (Democrat of New York) and Lindsey Graham (Republican of South Carolina) proposed a framework for legislation last month.

But whether the Senate will consider a bill this year, and what its requirements would be for immigrants to achieve legal status, are far from clear.

Magui Rubalcava Shulman, director of immigration at Public Interest Projects, which runs several funds that support immigration issues, says donors have to strike a balance between how much they spend on grass-roots organizations and advocacy and “how much we spend our scarce dollars on the legalization piece when we don’t know what the outcome is going to be.”

But they acknowledge there could be a mad scramble if a law passes. Some charity officials are hopeful that George Soros, the billionaire hedge-fund manager and founder of the Open Society Institute, would make a big investment along the lines of the Emma Lazarus Fund, which he established to assist immigrants after the 1996 welfare overhaul.

Mr. Soros emigrated from Hungary and has made efforts to help immigrants a philanthropic priority.

Maria Teresa Rojas, who led Open Society’s domestic immigration program until recently and is now in charge of its grants on international migration, says Mr. Soros and the foundation recognize that an immigrant-legalization program will take a lot of money to execute well. But she says no new investment has been decided upon.

Still, Open Society and other grant makers are taking initial steps to investigate the scope of the needs to help undocumented immigrants integrate into society if a bill passes.

Assessing Needs

The Four Freedoms Fund, which is run by Ms. Rubalcava Shulman’s Public Interest Projects and supported by grant makers like the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Open Society, is beginning to study which parts of the country are least-equipped to help immigrants apply to become legal residents.

With $25,000 from the Texas Access to Justice Foundation and $5,000 from a second organization, Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of San Antonio has trained nearly 200 staff members and volunteers of churches, domestic-abuse groups, and other nonprofit groups in Texas to handle legal issues facing immigrant victims of domestic violence.

Linda Brandmiller, director of immigration services at the San Antonio affiliate of Catholic Charities, says the training sessions could be a model for how her group and others prepare local charities to handle immigrants’ legal issues if legislation does pass.

A group of foundations in California—home to roughly 3 million of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants—is studying the gaps in aid in their state.

The effort is loosely organized by Grantmakers Concerned With Immigrants and Refugees, an umbrella group of funds that support programs to help people who move to the United States., The Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund, the Rosenberg Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and others may try to reach out to immigrants through some of the methods they have used in a $9.5-million effort to educate people about the U.S. Census, such as involving health-care workers and volunteers.

Meanwhile, officials at the Minneapolis Foundation are giving $450,000 to help create what they hope will be a $1.5-million fund to help nonprofit groups in their state respond.

And a New York fund called Unbound Philanthropy contributed $52,000 to the Migration Policy Institute to study how many people would need to complete high-school courses to qualify for legal residency under the requirements of immigration legislation.

The organization is working with the Community College Consortium for Immigrant Education, a group started two years ago with a $225,000 grant from the J.M. Kaplan Fund, in New York.

A Welcoming America

Nonprofit officials also say efforts to help educate Americans about immigrants will be key to ensuring the legalization process goes smoothly.

Three years ago, the Four Freedoms Fund helped create a group called Welcoming America, which works in 13 states to promote respect among U.S. citizens and immigrants by holding local meetings and running advertisements.

“Our role now is to get communities to understand each other,” says David Lubell, the group’s executive director. “But the work will be different when the law of the land is that these people need to be integrated.”