Brea Plans ‘Enlightened Approach’ to Aid Dayworkers

A job center program being hailed by immigrant-rights advocates as one of the county’s most humane and comprehensive attempts to deal with day laborers will be considered by the City Council next week.

Unlike similar centers in the county, however, Brea’s would not exclude services to illegal immigrants. “Whether the men using it are documented or undocumented, that’s up to the employer to ascertain,” Mayor Carrey J. Nelson said last week.

Nelson described the proposal, which is scheduled to go before the council Tuesday, as an “enlightened approach” in tune with Brea’s “family and moral values.”

The proposal, Nelson said, calls for a more “humane and evenhanded” program than others being operated by neighboring cities.

Dayworkers, he said--referring to many of the Spanish-speaking men who congregate at a corner at Walnut Avenue and Imperial Highway in hope that an employer will stop and offer work--”pay taxes, rent and pay for their shoes and groceries just like all of us.”

The $40,000 experimental proposal will provide dayworkers with breakfast, counseling and survival skills, and help match them with employers for a year.

“One of the most important distinctions here,” said Father Jaime Soto, vicar for the Latino community in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange, “is that the city of Brea is treating these individuals as residents of the city, and that is an important frame of mind.”

Although the 1986 federal Immigration Reform and Control Act makes it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers, Brea officials said they will admit all dayworkers regardless of immigration status.

Ben Davidian, western regional commissioner for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said last week through a spokeswoman that although he would like to see changes in the proposed Brea program, his agents will not raid the job center.

“If the INS wants to swoop down and make an arrest, they’re certainly within their rights, and we can’t stop that,” Nelson said.

Many county cities have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in dealing with complaints that laborers congregate and loiter on street corners while seeking work.

Police in Orange started an all-out assault three years ago. They arrested hundreds of predominantly Latino laborers on misdemeanor violations and turned most of them over to the Border Patrol for deportation. That city plans to open a hiring hall March 26, but it will be open only to workers who can furnish documentation of legal residency.

Costa Mesa opened a similarly restricted hiring hall two years ago and has subsequently enacted laws regulating job solicitation. It is fighting two lawsuits brought by groups challenging the constitutionality of at least one provision.

“The problem with those approaches,” said Sally Urenda, executive director of the Gary Center, a social service agency in La Habra, “is that it’s got to be open to all, legal or illegal (laborers), for the program to work.

Centers in Los Angeles have adopted hiring halls that do not require proof of immigration status. And Laguna Beach has the same policy for a dayworker gathering site outside a Circle K store in North Laguna.

Brea officials said Friday that they will recommend that the Gary Center operate the job center as a joint project with the El Modena Community Center in Orange.

No site has been selected, but Urenda said that in discussions with city officials, a location near Imperial Highway and Walnut Avenue has been suggested.

The job skills proposed through the Brea program, which may eventually include teaching English, are aimed at moving the laborers onto a higher rung of the economic ladder, Soto said.

“Whether we like it or not,” said Urenda of the Gary Center, “these workers are here and they’re here to stay.”

Under the program, two people would provide information and referral to dayworkers, keep a job-skill file for matching clients with jobs and operate a domestic-service phone bank. More mental health, counseling and other services will be coordinated through the Gary Center, which will assign more staff members as needed, Urenda said.

The breakfast program will be developed in part with federal surplus commodities and donated food from surrounding bakeries and grocery stores. She added: “One of the biggest fears we found by talking to these men is that they are afraid they’re going to be apprehended.”

Virginia Kice, an INS spokeswoman, said the federal agency would prefer that Brea adopt a hiring hall similar to the one in Costa Mesa.

“But if they aren’t comfortable with that proposition, we at least hope they will advise employers about the law, because employers ultimately have to bear the responsibility,” Kice said.