Day Laborers, Illegal Aliens & Immigration

In Defense of Day Laborers

As I have written before, our entire history of immigration policy has been munged because it has been primarily a political tool and an institutionalized instrument of racism. But the argument coming from this NY Times editorial doesn't quite get it either.

In cities and suburbs across America, the confluence of homes, big-box stores and striving immigrant men has created an informal, often unruly job marketplace that has survived every effort to ban it or harass it out of existence.

This market, of Latino day laborers, is hardly the only manifestation of the shadow immigrant economy, but it is the hardest to ignore. These are the immigrants whom localities seem the most desperate to subdue, usually with laws against loitering and job solicitation. A Los Angeles suburb, Baldwin Park, is the latest of dozens to tackle the problem, with an antisoliciting bill written broadly enough to cover cookie-selling Girl Scouts but really meant for the Latino men at Home Depot.

It is significant that we admit there is an underground economy, a shadow immigrant world, and an entire class of people we choose to not only ignore, but also mistreat by way of our laws, policies and practices. Indeed, we could make the argument that our own actions have created a majority of the immigration problems we currently face. Certainly the blind eye we have turned toward migrant workers, immigrants that over-stay their visas, and the entire issue of illegal immigration. Even more convicting of our own policies and practices is the blind eye we have turned toward those that have deliberately, as well as through omission, exploited the underground workers among us. But we are a nation accustomed to exploiting workers, even after our predecessors fought hard to establish unions and pass laws to protect workers.

Such crackdowns are constitutionally dubious and usually fail, and some lawmakers are having doubts about them. Last week, on Long Island, the Suffolk County Legislature defeated a bill to drive away day laborers by forbidding them to “obstruct” county roads. The majority understood that the dimly reasoned measure would have simply diverted workers and contractors’ trucks onto other roads while inviting civil-rights lawsuits. It would not have reduced the population of day laborers the least bit.

This is the same approach used to bury the homeless populations in various cities and states. The rationale is that if we ban the problem, the problem does not exist, or at least it will go away from our own backyards. The NIMBY approach has never worked and we know it. Almost every attempt to use this type of stop-gap measure has failed and has faced constitutional challenges... and failed those challenges as well. Far be from our worthy political leadership to seek out genuine solutions rather than entertain all sorts and forms of denial.

It was a good outcome for a bad bill, but the county is still stuck where it has been for years — wondering how to handle a volatile mixture of men and trucks in a suburb that wishes they would go away. A good next step for Suffolk would be to come around to a solution that other communities have tried, with generally positive results: a hiring site.

I do not agree that there was a good outcome, but I do agree that the bill was a bad solution strategy.

One can oppose illegal immigration and still approve of hiring sites, places where laborers can find shade, toilets and a safe place to negotiate jobs with contractors and homeowners. The most obvious reasons are crowd control and traffic safety.

I disagree. Either we are going to immerse ourselves in the fascist policy of excluding those we do not approve of because of their origins and reasons for entering--and staying--in our country, or we are going to find a genuine solution that will be fair, just, non-discriminatory, and preserve our nation's borders. In this case we have an either-or dilemma: either we are fascist, racist and evil, or we are just and will seek out a just solution. Compromise may be the way of the politician, but it is sometimes a path toward evil as well.

But an equally compelling reason is that hiring sites impose order on free-market chaos. An unregulated day-labor bazaar wallows in the mud flats of capitalism, benefiting sleazy contractors and fostering rock-bottom wages and working conditions for all laborers, legal or not. Hiring sites that register and monitor contractors and laborers can hold them all to account. Employers who undercut competitors and rob workers will find it hard to return to a well-established hiring site, and drunks and belligerents among the laborers will be pressured to toe the line. These places are sometimes called “shape-up sites,” an apt term in more ways than one.

Order is a step toward justice, but it is not justice in and of itself. The argument made in this editorial is not just.

Some lawmakers have gotten over the notion that hiring sites are gifts to illegals, and have concluded that approaching day laborers as community members, with rights and civic responsibilities, is smarter than ranting about them as pests. It is heartening that some local officials are willing to confront the realities of a flawed immigration system and to work responsibly to lessen its troublesome side effects.

How is it that politicians always see a blaming-the-victim strategy as a gift to those being oppressed? Everyone needs to read William Ryan's "Blaming the Victim."

Then there are those who hold out hope that with just one more crackdown, one more ticketing blitz, the men who make our suburbs gleam will take their sweat and muscle elsewhere and leave us alone to tend our homes and hedges by ourselves. Government officials on Long Island, as elsewhere, have tried stiff-necked hostility to day laborers, and have reaped years of failure. They should consider hiring sites as the next, positive step — one that promises not only to be practical and humane, but also effective.

My grandmother used to tell me that the definition of insanity was repeating the same mistake over and over while expecting different outcomes. It seems to me that the current approach to illegal immigration fits within that definition.