Preserving Individual Rights

The gathering of Latino day laborers on street corners in search of jobs has been a problem plaguing many Orange County communities. Not all of them have handled the problem well.

Orange, for example, for weeks followed a policy of harassing and rousting workers. The Orange Police Department worked with the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport any illegal workers it found. And now the city has given preliminary approval to two ordinances that are legally questionable. One will make it unlawful to solicit employment from a vehicle or while a pedestrian is standing on a public right of way. The other prohibits that kind of solicitation on private property without a city permit.

Costa Mesa has a similar ordinance already in force. And merchants in one shopping center recently made citizens’ arrests for trespassing of nine undocumented workers who congregated on the center’s parking lot.

We can sympathize with the problem merchants and residents face, but those are harsh, unfeeling and legally questionable extremes.

A better approach is the one taken in Laguna Beach, or in Glendale and Los Angeles. In Laguna, the city opened an outdoor hiring hall on a remote stretch of Laguna Canyon Road that has lured most of the dayworkers away from a convenience market parking lot on Coast Highway, where nearby residents had been complaining about their presence. Glendale solved the problem by establishing a pickup site, painting a white loading zone on the curb. Seven local businesses contributed money to provide a portable toilet. In Los Angeles, two Catholic churches offered their grounds as sanctuaries for workers and employers.

Those are better approaches. They respect individual rights and address the real issue--the congregating of workers rather than their legal status.