Illegal Alien Congregations on City Streets Spark Outcry

As recently as five years ago, the sight of a dozen or so Latino men waiting for jobs along busy North Coast Highway in Laguna Beach was regarded as little more than a harmless curiosity by many locals.

Since then, Laguna residents have seen the number of Latino dayworkers grow to as many as 150. It’s a development that has some people concerned.

“They make litter and sometimes they fight,” said hotel proprietor Paul Kim, who rents to some of the laborers. “I’d like to see something done about them.”

Reports of Growing Groups

Laguna Beach is one of a handful of cities across Orange County where police are reporting growing numbers of undocumented laborers gathering on local street corners in search of work. It comes on the heels of the new immigration reform act passed last year, which provides a penalty of up to six months in jail for employers who hire illegal aliens lacking proof of residency.

Throughout Southern California, the number of undocumented laborers seeking work at such pick-up spots seems to have increased in the wake of the new law, according to U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials.

Ernest Gustafson, Los Angeles district director of the INS, attributed the increase to compliance of the new law by “75%” of U.S. employers. Consequently, jobs are so hard to find now that many of the undocumented aliens cannot find work even on the streets, Gustafson said.

“Some of them have been around for several months without working at all,” Gustafson said.

Indeed, laborers such as Rojelio Martinez, 25, in Laguna Beach, say they are lucky if they can work three days in a week. “There is no work,” the Mexican national said in Spanish with a sign Tuesday.

In Orange County, the increase in undocumented laborers gathering on local street corners has been reported mainly in Costa Mesa, Placentia and the city of Orange, as well as Laguna Beach. In Santa Ana, which has a large population of illegal aliens, police report no significant increase in laborers congregating at popular pick-up sites.

With the increased visibility of Latino workers has come a resulting increase in complaints from local merchants and residents. Police said they have been forced to respond to the complaints in an assortment of ways.

Task forces to improve understanding of the cultural differences between U.S. citizens and Latino immigrants have been one method that has tempered resentment in some neighborhoods.

Hard-Line Stance

The city of Orange, where the task-force approach was tried a few years ago, has taken a hard-line stance. Orange police, inundated with complaints about the estimated 400 undocumented laborers seeking work along East Chapman Avenue, last week began citing dayworkers for the slightest infractions and turning them over to the U.S. Border Patrol for deportation when they could not show proof of legal residency.

Since the sweeps began last Wednesday, police in Orange have arrested and turned over 106 day laborers to the Border Patrol near San Clemente. City officials said Tuesday that the crackdown is to continue indefinitely, pending further review. The number of workers congregating, meanwhile, had been cut by more than half by Tuesday, police said.

Law enforcement officers in other cities have taken a less extreme approach.

In Costa Mesa, where the number of dayworkers congregating in Lion’s Park near Placentia Avenue has risen from about two dozen two years ago to more than 60 today, the City Council formed a task force of local community leaders to address the resulting complaints from local residents.

Task force members last summer went into residents’ homes and explained how economic pressures in Latin America were forcing workers there to look in America for employment, said Costa Mesa City Councilwoman Mary Hornbuckle, who suggested the task force’s formation 1 1/2 years ago.

The task force recommended that the city appoint a human relations committee to continue the work of educating local residents as well as the day laborers themselves, Hornbuckle said. That committee was appointed, and, in conjunction with the Orange County Human Relations Commission, next month is scheduled to spend a week visiting residents’ homes to discuss the general problem of ethnic misunderstanding.

Police Chief Dave Snowden said that as residents have come to understand the dayworkers, the complaints have diminished. He added that most of the complaints stemmed from initial fear at seeing masses of people from a different culture.

“They viewed these people as a threat when they were not,” Snowden said.

In Laguna Beach, the police last month began distributing flyers to the laborers, advising them in Spanish to observe local laws, such as not drinking or urinating in public.

Police Chief Neil Purcell said the flyers “have helped a little bit.” But he said residents still complain about the use of profanity and throwing beer bottles against cliffs. Purcell said the Police Department responds to complaints on a case-by-case basis and has no intention of instituting any massive sweeps.

“As far as looking for minor things, we don’t make it a practice to seek dark-colored people out for the purpose of catching them in some minor violation of the law,” Purcell said.

Dayworkers interviewed Tuesday in Laguna Beach said they try not to make any trouble. They said they would be glad to try and find work elsewhere but that they have no other place to look now that the new immigration law has taken effect.

“This is about the only place we can get a job without (legal residency) papers,” said day laborer Pablo Villanueva, 41.

In Placentia, where about 60 undocumented aliens congregate each morning at the intersection of Bradford and Santa Fe avenues, police say they have adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude about whether to adopt the city of Orange’s crackdown policy.

Capt. Walter Pichon noted that there have been few complaints involving the laborers, who congregate in a mostly Latino neighborhood. Pichon said that should complaints arise, the city would consider, among other things, the legality of conducting the kind of sweeps occurring in Orange.

Immigration rights groups have questioned the legality of targeting a particular ethnic group for enforcement of minor violations such as littering and jaywalking.

Mayor Defends Actions

Orange Mayor Jess F. Perez defended the city’s actions Tuesday as a necessary response to an overwhelming problem. Perez said the crackdown came after Orange three years ago tried the task-force approach but failed to get results.

The task force, composed of representatives from Mexican-American neighborhoods, local churches and the business community, directed its efforts toward finding a more suitable location for the dayworkers to gather, Perez said. It was hoped that they could be relocated to an area where they would not draw so many complaints from merchants, their customers and surrounding homeowners.

Working with the task force to find such a site was the Orange County Human Relations Commission. Rusty Kennedy, the commission’s executive director, said the dayworkers were relocated to two sites along Hewes Street off Chapman Avenue, one a park, the other a nearby vacant lot.

But Perez said the plan did not work because few day workers were willing to participate. He said many feared they would be rounded up by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials if they congregated in spots set aside by Orange.

Another problem, according to Kennedy, was that residents of the neighborhoods surrounding the new congregation sites also began complaining about the workers. Kennedy said there did not appear to be a place in Orange where the workers could gather and not draw residents’ complaints.

The task force also consulted state and federal legislators to see if funding could be made available to build a structure where the laborers could congregate, said Robert Torres, 62, a local homeowner and member of the task force. But Torres said no such funding could be had.

Even as the task force labored to find an alternate site, residents living near where the workers were gathering besieged City Hall with complaints. Carol Goodman, a local resident, said as many as 300 Latino men would stand around, staring at women passers-by, spitting and urinating on sidewalks and running into the paths of cars.

“The smell of urine is so bad down there that you don’t even want to walk on the sidewalk,” Goodman said.

Merchants along East Chapman Avenue also complained that their businesses were being ruined because residents such as Goodman were too afraid to patronize them.

“A lot of customers tell me they won’t come back because of all the people here,” said Huong Ung, manager of Friendly Donuts at the corner of Chapman and Hewes Street, where hundreds of illegals have congregated each morning for jobs. “We have always had problems with them.”

Since the start of sweeps last week, police in Orange said the switchboards have been lighted up with calls of thanks. Mayor Perez said that while he empathized with the economic plight of the undocumented workers, the city’s first obligation is to taxpayers such as Goodman.

Perez acknowledged that his city’s crackdown is not the final solution to the dayworkers’ problem. He said that while the workers may temporarily leave his city, they will probably resurface in adjoining communities.

Other Alternatives

Perez said, however, that he would like to reconvene the city’s day-laborer task force to examine other alternatives, and he welcomed the help of the county Human Relations Commission in tackling the problem.

But he added that the problem needs to be addressed at the national level, with funding made available for such things as employment counseling for the laborers.

Councilwoman Hornbuckle in Costa Mesa suggested that little could be done on the local or national level to stem the tide of illegal aliens flooding into this country to seek work.

“The only thing that will stop them is an improved economy in Mexico, and I don’t see that happening,” she said. “If I lived across an imaginary line established by men, and on the other side was the land of milk and honey and I was starving, you bet I’d be on the other side too.”

Staff writer Bob Schwartz contributed to this story.