Hope of Jobs Surmounts Illegals’ Fears : Immigration: 150 workers--and no INS agents--turn out as Los Angeles opens its first day-labor hiring site.

Jorge Lujan couldn’t resist a little dark humor Friday as he approached the rented school bus that would take him and 150 other day laborers to Los Angeles’ first city-operated hiring site.

“I think I’ll walk instead, because that bus is headed for Tijuana,” quipped Lujan, a Mexican immigrant who nonetheless boarded the bus.

The humor masked real fears among the immigrant workers, most of whom are in the country illegally and face the threat of deportation. But there were no U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents present as the city opened the hiring site for day laborers in Harbor City.

Most of the workers are undocumented immigrants and, in a remarkable show of faith in the city program, all but a handful rode the bus to a lakeside park where they hoped to meet prospective employers.

“I was happy to see everybody on the bus,” said Nancy Cervantes, coordinator of the city’s Day Laborer Program. “Even though we’ve been working closely with the men, you never know what will happen the day of the event.”

Still, not much hiring went on during the program’s first day, as a mariachi band, city politicians and journalists descended on the site, nearly outnumbering the laborers themselves.

Instead of lingering on the sidewalk hailing passing cars, the workers will now drink coffee and eat Mexican sweetbread while patiently sitting on park benches waiting to be hired for a day’s work.

The $90,000 city program has drawn national attention because it effectively aids the hiring of illegal immigrants by private employers in apparent defiance of federal immigration laws. Although the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act makes it illegal for employers to hire undocumented immigrants, city officials say they will admit all day laborers to the hiring site, regardless of their immigration status.

“We’ve been meeting with the INS and I hope we can work together,” said Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who represents the Harbor City area. “If the INS comes and raids the site, (the workers) will scatter and go back to the streets again.”

The site is the first of at least six to be created under a six-month pilot project. The City Council created the project in February in response to complaints by residents of Harbor City and other communities. A second hiring hall is scheduled to open in Sun Valley later this year.

The hiring site is on a small lawn overlooking a lake at Harbor Regional Park and consists of an office inside a small trailer, as well as three portable toilets. City officials say the laborers will be allowed to meet employers there six days a week, from 6 a.m. to noon. The workers will register at the office according to their job skills, including painting, gardening and roofing.

When they are not working, the laborers will be able to receive free legal counseling and English classes.

“It’s good here. It’s nice,” said Gilberto Castillo, 24, a native of Guadalajara. “Whether or not it works depends on us. There’s only a few who are against it. . . . We need to be united.”

The success of the program will also depend on the INS. On Friday, the agency reiterated statements made by INS Western Regional Commissioner Ben Davidian, who said the agency has no plans to raid the new hiring site.

“We don’t want to disrupt what’s going on there,” INS spokesman Ron Rogers said. “We just want employers to be aware that they are still responsible for following the federal law,” which prohibits hiring illegal immigrants.

City employees will continue to bus the day laborers from the intersection of Belle Porte Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway--where they gathered before Friday’s move--to the new hiring site for two more days. The city Department of Transportation has posted signs on nearby streets directing employers to the new hiring site.

By late Friday morning, the city program had accomplished, if only temporarily, its principal objective: removing the day laborers from the sidewalks where they had become a nuisance.

“Marvelous,” said Joseph D’Angelo, a car salesman who surveyed the scene from the lot of the Harbor City Discount Auto Center on Pacific Coast Highway. “Usually, it’s an unsightly situation. A woman can’t walk down the streets because of the catcalling.”

There was, however, a lone worker standing at the corner, looking somewhat lost.

“This is the first time I’ve come here,” said Oscar Vasquez, a 28-year-old Mexican immigrant. “My friends told me this is a place where you can get work, but there’s no one here.”