L.A. Opens Day-Laborer Hiring Site to All Comers

In a controversial program that will effectively aid the hiring of illegal immigrants by private employers, the city of Los Angeles today will begin encouraging day laborers to move from their usual street-corner gathering places to a city-operated hiring site.

If all goes as planned, more than 150 day laborers, many of them illegal immigrants, will be bused from the intersection of Pacific Coast Highway and Belle Porte Avenue to nearby Harbor Regional Park in Harbor City, where they will be registered by city employees and hired by private contractors.

Although the 1986 federal Immigration Reform and Control Act makes it illegal for employers to hire undocumented immigrants, city officials say they will admit all of the day laborers regardless of their immigration status.

And, in what may mark a major departure from past federal immigration tactics, recently appointed INS Western Regional Commissioner Ben Davidian said Thursday that, although he would like to see changes in the city program, his agents will not raid the site.

The city attorney’s office argues that Los Angeles, although helping illegal immigrants find work, is not violating new immigration law because the city is not directly hiring the laborers. The move is part of a six-month pilot program aimed at regulating the hiring of day workers who typically find work by congregating at selected intersections around the city.

The City Council unanimously approved the creation of six or seven officially sanctioned hiring sites in February in response to complaints from residents in Harbor City and other communities about the workers loitering, blocking traffic and harassing women. The council also agreed to establish eight other hiring sites--one in each council district--if the pilot program succeeds.

“We believe the only way to stop people from congregating on street corners is to have them go to specific sites,” said Bernie Evans, chief deputy to Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who authored the city ordinance.

Evans said the pilot program may cause a dilemma for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is charged with preventing employers from hiring undocumented immigrants, but he added, “This (program) is a local solution to a local problem.”

According to city officials, several thousand laborers, mostly Latino men, gather each morning at about 25 street corners scattered throughout the city to seek day work. On most days, chaos reigns at the intersections. Desperate for work, the men often rush into traffic to check out a prospective employer, panicking some motorists.

By contrast, city officials hope the Harbor City experiment will be a model of order and a place where the day laborers will feel welcome.

A mariachi band will play for the workers on the first day, giving the proceedings a festive air. Two city workers will be at the site, greeting the laborers each morning with free coffee and doughnuts. At an office set up in a trailer, the staff members will establish a registration system to try to assure that all the men find at least some work.

Free legal advice and English classes also will be available to the men. And, since the site is city-sanctioned, the laborers will not be cited by the police for loitering, as they often have been in the past.

“The way they explained it to us, it sounds pretty good,” Jose Luis Soriano, 30, said in Spanish as he waited for work at the Harbor City intersection Thursday morning. But Soriano, who arrived in Southern California two months ago from the central Mexican state of Michoacan, added that some of the workers are suspicious of the program’s motives.

“There are a lot of us here who think it’s a trap so that the immigration (service) can trap us all in one big raid,” he said.

The day laborers said they typically earn about $5 an hour for work in painting, gardening, roofing and a variety of other jobs. Most live in Harbor City and South-Central Los Angeles, supporting families and sending money back to their native countries.

One worker, Jorge Lujan, said he wasn’t sure employers would come to the new site. “The bosses already know this (Belle Porte Avenue) place, so there’s work here,” he said. “Even in the winter, there’s work.”

Nancy Cervantes, coordinator of the city program, said the success of the hiring sites depends on winning the confidence of the immigrant workers, who have a deep-seated distrust of the authorities.

“If the INS raided the site, it would be the death knell of the program,” she said.

In a meeting with City Atty. James K. Hahn and other city officials on Monday, INS Los Angeles district counsel John Bartos and Assistant District Director John Brechtel requested that an INS agent be allowed on the hiring site to distribute pamphlets explaining the 1986 immigration law to prospective employers.

City officials said they would forward the INS request to the City Council, which is expected to review the pilot program later this year.

But Cervantes, the program’s coordinator, said that posting an INS agent at the site would have “a chilling effect” on the day laborers.

Deputy City Atty. Francisco Orozco, who also attended the meeting with the INS officials, said that even though most of the workers at the Harbor City hiring site probably are illegal immigrants, he does not believe the city program encourages employers to violate the 1986 immigration law.

“We’re not a hiring hall, we’re not a union,” Orozco said. “We’re just providing a space for prospective employers to meet with potential employees.”

Orozco said the decision to admit illegal immigrants into the hiring site was simply an extension of a policy to disregard immigration status when providing city services.

Los Angeles is not the first city to tackle the day-laborer problem.

Last year, the Glendale City Council voted to experiment with a city-sanctioned hiring site at a Catholic youth center, rather than adopt a proposed ordinance that would have banned street-corner job solicitation. Although the youth center closed its doors to the workers last month, Glendale officials said they will try to find another community group to accommodate the workers.

In Orange County, Costa Mesa established a city-sanctioned hiring hall last year. But the hall is open only to laborers who can show proof of their legal status in this country. INS Regional Commissioner Davidian said he would like to see the Los Angeles program adopt similar regulations.

“The INS is not going to go down there and shut down these hiring halls,” Davidian said, “but I would like to see the city check the documents of these workers. If they’re not willing to go that far, they should inform the employers they may be violating the law.”

Immigration activists welcomed the decision not to raid the site as a sign that Davidian may be more diplomatic than his flamboyant and controversial predecessor, Harold W. Ezell, who contended that most immigration activists were politically motivated.

During Ezell’s tenure, INS agents raided a Santa Ana church that had declared itself a sanctuary, arresting an illegal immigrant who sought political asylum there.

“(Davidian) has to take a different tack. No one is going to be as outrageous as Ezell,” said Linda Mitchell of the Coalition for Humane Immigration Rights of Los Angeles. “I think that he made the right decision. Politically, for the INS to come in and raid a site (today) would not be in their interest.”

The City Council has allocated $90,000 for the pilot program. A second hiring site is scheduled to open in Sun Valley in the San Fernando Valley later this year, while a third site will probably be established near downtown Los Angeles early next year, Cervantes said.