Migrant Hiring Hall Gets Its First Workout

Jorge Horlando Velasquez was one of the first ones. He showed up at the roadside field in Encinitas even before the sun did, arriving in a van with six other migrant workers, shivering in the pre-dawn darkness.

For eight years, since he traveled here from central Mexico as a 15-year-old, he has started each day with two things on his mind. First, he finds a cup of coffee. Then he starts looking for work.

Most days, he wakes with six friends in the van that has become their home. Together, they walk to a nearby convenience store along Encinitas Boulevard, yawning at the passing cars as they wait for los patrones-- the bosses--to cruise by in their expensive pickup trucks.

But Wednesday morning was different. This time, Velasquez and his companions came to this isolated stretch of hills along El Camino Real near Olivenhain Road--the first laborers to seek employment through the city’s newly opened hiring hall for migrant workers.

Like many others, he said, he was giving the city a chance to make good on its promise to help migrants find daily and even full-time work without the hassle and boredom of waiting on street corners.

“On the street, you take chances that the employers will come,” he said, sipping from a cup of steaming coffee. “Here, you have a more secure feeling believing that the bosses know where they can find us.”

On this first day of the hall’s operation, Velasquez and 2 dozen other migrants weren’t alone as they watched the early-morning traffic. Gloria Carranza, the city’s transients issue coordinator, two state employment workers and several volunteers stood by with them, nervously waiting for employers to show up.

Carranza had arisen at 3:45 a.m. to pick up the motor home at a nearby fire station and drive it to the hiring hall site--vacant but for the two portable toilets and a commercial catering van.

The hiring hall, one of a handful in the state, was the most ambitious crack the city had taken at the migrant problem since she started her job last year. City officials hope the hiring hall will provide a meeting ground for documented workers and North County employers.

In recent years migrant workers have been attracted to Encinitas because of an abundance of jobs offered by local growers. However, because of the coastal city’s high cost of living, most migrant families cannot afford even the cheapest apartments. The result has been literally hundreds of migrant families sleeping on the ground along the hillsides, in some cases even in cardboard boxes.

Earlier this year, a migrant assistance group filed suit against Encinitas, claiming the city’s general plan is not farsighted enough to provide for housing for lower income families such as migrant workers. The case is still pending.

Advocates for the hiring hall claim that the job center is a service to migrants, providing them with a way to find work. Some of its detractors call it a racist effort to rid the streets of Mexican and South American migrants who converged at some of the city’s street corners looking for work.

According to Carranza, the hiring hall will be open Monday through Saturday from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.

A week before the hall’s opening, Carranza and workers from the state’s Employment Development Department had visited the city’s known hiring corners, handing out leaflets and pre-registering more than 60 eligible workers. They also contacted perspective employers with specifics about the new hall.

Like a sister hall in Costa Mesa, the Encinitas job center only services documented aliens. But, unlike the one in Costa Mesa, the local hall has the added dimension of being tapped into the EDD job bank of possible employers, said Art Martinez, an EDD employment representative at the hiring site.

“Workers who show up won’t just be able to seek jobs from motorists,” he said. “They’ll also be considered by the sometimes dozens of employers who call the employment development department offices each day looking for hires.”

Carranza added: “It’s the marriage of city and state agencies to attack the migrant problem. And it’s the first time that’s ever happened in the whole state of California.”

If the hall is a success, officials say, Encinitas might enact an ordinance making it illegal to solicit work on the street. The documented workers would have the hiring hall. But such an ordinance could be expected to make life even more difficult for those without documents to find work.

“The only way this hall is going to help solve the problem is if the Border Patrol people follow up by making sweeps of the known hiring corners for illegals and by getting tough with employers who continue to hire them,” Carranza said.

By 8 a.m. Wednesday, 2 dozen documented migrants had done their part on the hiring hall’s opening day--they had shown up. But there wasn’t an employer in sight.

“You don’t know how happy I’ll be to see that first employer pull up and hire some of these men,” Carranza said. “But right now, I’m apprehensive. I want this to work. But, like any new business, I guess, it takes time to develop clientele.”

At morning’s end, only three employers had visited the job center site. Still, Carranza said, 25 of the 26 migrants were hired through calls to the local EDD offices.

Several found full-time jobs as custodians at a local mall. Others found day work moving furniture, doing landscape and construction work, including a man officials said hadn’t found day work in over two months on the street corners.

“I feel good,” Carranza said after she totaled the day’s results, “especially about the added dimension of being tapped into the EDD job bank.”

Like most new businesses, Carranza said, the hiring hall began its struggle even before it opened its doors. In the two years since a city task force conceived the idea for the hall, the project has faced skeptics among migrants, homeowners and council members.

Even after the council approved money for the hall this summer, residents of several nearby housing subdivisions appealed to the city to reverse its decision, claiming that the hall had no specific long-term plan.

After the city’s four-month site lease with a Texas-owned development company expires, they say, what will happen then? Where will the hall move? Where will the migrants go?

Keith Mantis, who lives in a subdivision less than 200 yards from the hiring hall, led a group of homeowners in October to file 62 separate petitions with the city against the opening of the hall--all of which were denied.

“I’m angry,” the construction equipment salesman said Tuesday night, before the job center’s opening. “I feel we’ve got a City Council who basically won’t listen to its constituency.

“The issue isn’t the location of the hall, just because it’s in my back yard. The issue is the entire concept. It hasn’t been thought out. There’s no long-term plan. Hell, there’s not even a short-term plan.”

Migrants have also called the hall’s location inconvenient--several miles from any of the established job corners. They work long hours for their money. The last thing they need is a several-mile walk just to find work, several said.

“We need transportation,” said Alex Sanchez, as he stood with a half-dozen men in front of a supermarket on Encinitas Boulevard, miles away from the center. “We can’t walk. Anyway, many of these men don’t have documentation papers. They won’t do anything for them at the hall.”

Hiring hall officials had anticipated such problems. While spreading word about the hiring hall, Martinez said, they spoke with more than 300 migrants, only 20% of whom had green cards.

“For the eligible ones, there are buses that run on both El Camino Real and Encinitas Boulevard all morning,” she said. “There are ways to get here, even if it means riding a bike. These people know how to get around.”

And Carranza said that, although the center can’t supply jobs for undocumented workers, it can offer them tips on how to find other necessities such as food and clothing.

The center, she said, can also help migrant workers with their biggest complaint--getting cheated by unscrupulous employers. Each employer must register with the city when he picks up workers. And people who don’t pay fairly will be tracked down, she said.

Right now, the hiring hall consists of the small motor home where volunteers screen applicants and ascertain their job skills. Officials recently leveled the area with a bulldozer and spread wood chips to keep down the dust.

Eventually, Carranza said, officials would like to provide benches and maybe some covering for waiting workers. And maybe--through donations--one day provide them with transportation to and from the site.

Right now, though, what you see is what you get at Encinitas’ new hiring hall.

The workers who arrived Wednesday picked numbers from a cardboard box to see who would be eligible to work first. Several had specific skills, including Yrmo Ramirez, a stone mason who carried a book of laminated pictures of his intricate work like some small family photo album.

Jorge Velasquez, wearing a pair of old blue jeans and a blue cap that read in Spanish, “I can’t see, but I can feel,” stamped his feet in the pre-dawn cold, looking for any kind of work.

Several years ago, Velasquez moved his family to Tijuana so he could visit them regularly. One day, he hopes they will join him in Encinitas.

For now, he sends them $150 a week--80% of his earnings--his part to keep his close-knit family together. And so, in a way, he said, his whole family was waiting patiently for employers to show up.

“Let’s do it,” he said, laughing quietly with friends. “I’m ready to go to work.”