Brea Opens Hiring Hall for Immigrant Workers

Rafael Gonzalez could scarcely believe his good fortune.

After months of running up to cars aad trying to elbow others aside for menial day work, the undocumented Mexican immigrant was relaxing with a cup of coffee Monday, waiting for the work to come to him.

“It is more convenient,” Gonzalez, 34, said as he joined more than 50 other Latino immigrants at the new Brea Day-Worker Job Center. “Here we have restrooms. We have seats to sit on. We can talk and wait for the jobs.”

When it opened at 6 a.m. Monday, the Brea center became the first hiring hall in Orange County that does not require workers to carry proof of legal U.S. residency.

The city of Laguna Beach has maintained an outdoor hiring lot that does not distinguish between the documented and the undocumented, but Brea is the first city in the county and one of only a few in Southern California to set up a staffed facility open to all. (The city of Los Angeles has opened one such center and is setting up seven more.)

Two other hiring halls established in Costa Mesa and Orange over the past three years screen workers for residency documentation. Some undocumented immigrants have therefore remained at their old street corners, prompting continued complaints from residents and businesses.

Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, predicted that the Brea center will work better than the ones in Costa Mesa or Orange because it is designed to serve all day laborers, not just those with documents.

“I think it has a chance, if successful, to be a model program for all the cities in the county,” said Kennedy, who joined Brea Mayor Carrey Nelson and other city officials Monday at the opening of the Brea center.

U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials warned, however, that employers face criminal sanctions if they are caught hiring undocumented laborers from such a hiring hall. If they do not make sure the people they hire have proof of legal U.S. residency, the employers could be fined as much as $2,000 per immigrant under the provisions of the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act.

Some employers mistakenly assume that workers from a hiring hall have already been checked out, said John Brechtel, INS assistant district director for investigations. Indeed, one man who went to the Brea center looking for a gardener said he thought the laborers had been screened for documents.

For that reason, Brechtel said, the INS believes that hiring halls that screen for docments are better than those that do not.

“The Brea model is workable,” said Brechtel, who has consulted with officials in Brea, Orange and Costa Mesa. “But had they taken the extra step of screening the aliens, it would have provided more of a cushion for the employers. . . . I believe that the Costa Mesa model is best.”

Brechtel added that the INS has no immediate plans to stage a raid at the Brea center like the one last November at the city-sponsored hiring lot in Laguna Beach. Thirty-seven undocumented immigrants were arrested in that raid, which drew sharp criticism from Laguna Beach city officials.

Brechtel promised that his agency would notify the city of Brea first should it be planning any similar raid. He said that generally, the INS raids day laborer pickup sites only after there have been complaints of too many loitering along the street.

At the request of the INS, staff workers at the Brea center are handing out notices to employers that the laborers have not been screened. Frank Benest, Brea city manager and chief architect of the job center plan, said the city decided not to get into the business of checking documents because it only wanted to get the laborers off the street.

“This is a small community, and we’d like to have small solutions to problems,” Benest said. The population of his North County city is about 35,000.

Benest said the workers were causing a traffic safety problem because they were gathering in groups of 50 and more in a residential neighborhood off Walnut Avenue near Imperial Highway. The workers were running into traffic, he said, and employers were stopping and making unsafe turns to pick them up.

The city began planning the hiring hall about six months ago, Benest said. Officials set up a trailer on a city-owned vacant lot at Madrona Avenue and Imperial Highway, a block away from the pickup site. The lot will eventually be the site of a commercial development; when that happens, the center will move.

The city has allocated a total of about $40,000 for the program, which is to be evaluated after six months.

Of the roughly 55 workers who showed up at the center Monday, 23 were placed in jobs. The men were placed according to a lottery system. Payment is worked out between the employer and employee, with wages starting at about $5 for basic labor and going as high as $8 for more skilled work.

“For the weather, we’re doing fine,” said Carmen Munoz, the job center coordinator, as dozens of men huddled inside her cramped trailer to escape the cold and dampness.