Slow Economy, Hostile Streets Threaten Immigrant Day Laborers
Pacific News Service, Marcelo Ballve, Posted: Dec 05, 2002
To read this article in Spanish, click here.
One of America's most vulnerable groups of workers is struggling under the twin pressures of economic hard times and new national security initiatives.
SAN FRANCISCO--Before September 11, 2001, you saw them everywhere -- in hard hats on construction sites, manning landscape crews or splattered in paint, sprucing up the faces of houses in cities and small towns.
Today these immigrants for hire, who do everything from laying bricks to pruning roses, are struggling under a sputtering economy and the harsh glare of the burgeoning U.S. homeland security apparatus.
They are called day laborers, and along with other recent immigrants, accounted for half of the people entering the labor force in the l990s.
Along the West Coast, day labor work has declined by half in recent months, according to advocates. While exact numbers are hard to determine, the General Accounting Office -- the investigative arm of Congress -- reported this year there were 260,000 day laborers nationwide.
"The work is drying up," says San Francisco day laborer Daniel Rosas Romero, 42. Even though many have given up and returned home, newly unemployed immigrants turn up everyday, he adds.
And now, with security a dominant theme of government, ordinary citizens are looking at the workers with suspicion. "We now feel the racism is coming at us from all sides," including from reluctant employers and city residents who feel emboldened to lash out against day laborers, says Rosas, who entered the country illegally early in 2001.
According to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which says it has stepped up "removal" proceedings since Sept. 11, 314,000 undocumented immigrants are scheduled for deportation. Of that number, 90 percent are from Mexico, followed by Honduras, El Salvador and the Dominican Republic. This is the pool from which day laborers are drawn.
Wrapped in a puffy winter jacket, Rosas stands on a street corner and watches as fellow laborers rush a truck that stops to collect human cargo.
From the tangle of men - mostly undocumented Central Americans and Mexicans -- a handful are chosen for low-wage dry-walling and moving jobs.
Unlike most undocumented persons who try to avoid attracting attention, day laborers must make themselves conspicuous to find work. All along Cesar Chavez St. in San Francisco, the workers appear at dawn, often stretching sore limbs after nights spent under bridges or in shelters.
In the Los Angeles area, police departments report a post-Sept. 11 increase in demands the laborers be removed, according to Pablo Alvarado, Los Angeles-based coordinator of the National Day Labor Organizing Network.
In Long Island and Chicago, Latino groups accuse police of using loitering laws to conduct renewed sweeps against workers, Alvarado says. Once caught, many are defenseless. Most lack even birth certificates necessary for Mexican consulate ID cards.
Francisco Arcaute, INS spokesman in Los Angeles, says that immigration agents have boosted their cooperation with local police and participated in actions against the workers.
Such street-level enforcement will increase under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. "We hope that we can put a greater dent in the case of undocumented aliens" including day laborers.
The crackdown has put a chill on organizing, making workers reluctant to gather at rallies and conferences. "We're seeing the fear," Alvarado says.
In June, three workers on their way to a day labor conference in New York were detained changing a flat. A Pennsylvania state trooper turned the workers over to immigration authorities. One was deported; two others are awaiting deportation hearings, including Julieta Bolivar, 33, who may be returned to Bolivia after 17 years in the United States. Her three children are U.S. citizens.
In Maryland, a major day labor center closed during the Washington D.C.-area sniper shootings, fearing workers would be shot or caught in the dragnet.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) introduced a September bill setting safeguards for day laborers, but observers reckon it has no chance in a Republican Congress. This year, the Mexican Legal Defense and Education Fund won court cases against anti-day labor laws in two California cities.
Some San Francisco laborers now are being warned or even ticketed by police, who say they disrupt traffic.
Renee Saucedo, an attorney for the nonprofit La Raza Centro Legal, which manages the San Francisco Day Labor Program, intimates that racism is at work. "I think it's about scapegoating a community that you perceive as being vulnerable."
The city has frozen financial aid to the program, claiming it is poorly administered and hurts, not helps, day laborers.
Some business owners and homeowners say the workers depress property prices and commerce.
Francisco Miranda, 37, a legal U.S. resident, was laid off from United Parcel Service last year and now waits for work at pick-up points. He says that it used to be enough to have an address and a social security number to get work, but now employers are reluctant to hire Latinos. "In these times of war and terrorism, you have to tell them everything... The situation is tough."
PNS contributor Marcelo Ballve (ballve@hotmail.com) reported for the Associated Press in Brazil and the Caribbean.
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