Finding Work, Conflict in Suburbia : Immigrants: Economic conditions are forcing more day laborers to travel outside the city to look for jobs. But communities are cracking down.

Israel is a reverse commuter.

He and many other day laborers get up before dawn each day and ride for two hours on RTD buses from the Central American barrio near MacArthur Park to a placid suburban mall in Agoura Hills. There they wait for hours, and sometimes for days, to be hired off the street by subcontractors in pickup trucks and homeowners in BMWs.

“There’s no more work in Los Angeles,” said Israel, a 32-year-old Guatemalan father of six with prematurely gray hair under a red baseball cap. “All the street corners are full.”

He has found work in the suburbs. He has also found confrontation.

Over the past year, increasing numbers of day laborers have caused growing resentment in outlying suburbs such as Agoura Hills, Topanga Canyon and Santa Clarita, producing conflicts similar to those in predominantly white, upper-middle-class communities in Orange and San Diego counties. The day laborers say they have come to the suburbs because the economy is better and the streets are safer; the suburbanites say the laborers represent the kind of big-city blight that they left behind.

Last week, Israel stood among a wary group of men in an Agoura Hills shopping center parking lot, watched by a private security guard and a deputy in a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department patrol car. Israel said the number of day laborers at the corner of Kanan and Agoura roads has grown from about 10 to more than 100 in two years, as the declining economy has left more and more working immigrants on the street.

“What’s left in Los Angeles is selling rock cocaine, and that doesn’t interest me,” he said, describing how drug dealers have infiltrated his former corner in the Pico-Union area. “The only crime we are committing here is looking for work.”

The day laborers resent having to play cat-and-mouse with immigration authorities and sheriff’s deputies, who ticket and scare off would-be employers who are illegally parked. The laborers, who were interviewed in Spanish, say merchants and passersby harass them.

“Many times, people on the streets and in cars insult us,” said Alberto Calderon, a former factory worker with three children who was looking for work on San Fernando Road in east Newhall. “They think we don’t understand, but we understand.”

On the other hand, merchants and residents complain that the congregated men intimidate customers, drive away business, urinate in public, heckle women and interfere with traffic.

So governments have cracked down.

Agoura Hills passed a controversial law that bans soliciting work on the street. Topanga Canyon residents set up a hot line to report illegal immigrants, and a soup kitchen that served day laborers and homeless people who camped in canyons was shut down after its organizers received telephone threats.

In Santa Clarita, outspoken opposition from residents forced the City Council to abandon plans to open a hiring center for laborers. Unlike other areas, many of the laborers in Santa Clarita live in overcrowded, squalid apartments, houses and garages in the small Latino barrio of east Newhall. Some complaints about the influx of laborers came from longtime Latino residents of east Newhall, where the city has stepped up enforcement of housing codes to reduce overcrowding and unhealthy living conditions.

Instead of going through with the proposed hiring center, the council voted to call on the INS to solve the problem with more sweeps. Councilwoman Jill Klajic said public opinion swayed the council.

“What we hear from people in the Santa Clarita Valley is, honestly, let’s just get rid of them,” Klajic said. “I personally have difficulty with that.”

INS authorities admit, however, that they don’t have the resources to remove the laborers permanently, and day laborers remain in all three communities. Immigrant-rights advocates and some residents are fighting the hard-line measures of recent months, calling the hostile reaction both futile and racist.

The laborers are integral to the economy and are unfairly portrayed as aggressors, advocates say. Actually, they are more likely to be victims of abuse by employers who don’t pay them, advocates assert, adding that laborers should be treated as part of the communities where they work.

“We feel a city should not be in the business of banning people from working,” said Linda Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrants Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). “I find it un-American.”

CHIRLA outreach workers are organizing a protest march by day laborers for Wednesday at Agoura Hills City Hall. Lawyers will once again ask the City Council to repeal the work-solicitation ordinance, though city officials say that they are planning to beef up the ordinance to focus on employers. A similar ordinance in Costa Mesa was declared unconstitutional by an Orange County Superior Court judge, and attorneys said a lawsuit challenging the Agoura Hills measure is likely.

“People in the suburbs need these people to help build their homes because they don’t want to pay exorbitant prices, but they don’t want them out there,” Mitchell said. “They are saying: You can cut our lawns, you can do construction work at our sites, you can take care of our kids. But we don’t want to see you.”

The controversy has pitted neighbor against neighbor.

“Hooray for the Topanga Nazis,” a Topanga Canyon resident sarcastically wrote in a letter to the editor to the Topanga Messenger, referring to opponents of the workers.

Another resident wrote about those who hire day laborers: “It should be part of our civic duty as residents to photograph, videotape and report these lawbreakers. Without a police force, we must do the work.”

The laborers have followed the path of development and bus and rail lines to outlying suburbs, where jobs remain comparatively plentiful. There are still dozens of informal street-corner hiring sites in the inner city and the San Fernando Valley, but those corners have more would-be workers and less work than ever.

The recession and toughened laws against hiring illegal immigrants have pushed immigrants, including those who have gained steady jobs, further into the margins of the economy, according to immigrant-rights advocates and academic experts.

“Those who were marginal have become even more marginal,” said Leo Chavez, an anthropologist at UC Irvine.

The day labor population has changed and grown as a result, Chavez said. Many are family men who once held steady jobs. Many are Central Americans--85% of the Agoura Hills workers are, according to CHIRLA--who are legal or are eligible for political asylum.

For example, Gabriel, a 24-year-old Guatemalan who lives in Van Nuys, used to go to a West Valley corner at Vanowen and Canoga. Now he and six friends pile into an old car and drive to Agoura Hills, where he was picked up in an immigration sweep in June that laborer advocates have criticized, saying sheriff’s deputies went beyond their duties by helping Border Patrol agents chase down and arrest suspected illegal immigrants. The Sheriff’s Department denies going beyond its jurisdiction.

Gabriel was promptly released by the Border Patrol because he qualifies for legal status under a recent court ruling giving Guatemalans increased opportunity to seek political asylum.

“They gave me a piece of paper and let me go,” he said, shrugging.

Despite some of the hard-line measures, there are the beginnings of efforts to reach compromises with workers in Topanga, Santa Clarita and Agoura Hills. Santa Clarita, although rejecting a hiring hall, is trying to set up an employment program with the local office of the state’s Employment Development Department.

Last month, Agoura Hills opened a telephone job bank, with a $10,000 budget, to match workers with employers.

“It’s getting off to a slower start than we anticipated,” conceded Joe D’Onofrio, director of community services. The service has placed about 35 to 40 workers a week, but workers and their advocates say it will not work because both employers and laborers want to see each other before they strike a deal.

Agoura Hills Mayor Louise Rishoff said the phone bank is a sign of the city’s concern for the workers. “There isn’t very much to criticize the city for,” she said.

In Topanga Canyon, after months of acrimonious debate among residents over the defunct soup kitchen, the Town Council created the Topanga Canyon Day Laborer Committee, bringing both critics and supporters of the laborers together.

The committee this month asked Supervisor Ed Edelman for financial support and staff to open a hiring site in the canyon. The committee hopes to open a hiring hall in September.

Advocates say any true long-term solution will require communication and patience.

“This is a process of education for both sides,” CHIRLA outreach worker Carlos Ardon said.

Meanwhile, the debate continues on the streets.

About six laborers were standing outside Sebastian Simione’s family-style Italian restaurant in Santa Clarita on a recent morning when Simione pulled into the parking lot in his Mercedes to open his establishment. He told a group of four men to leave, then walked over to Alberto Calderon and Jose Reyes, who were talking to a reporter.

Simione, the son of immigrants from Sicily, said he sympathizes with the men but said he was upset because he blames them for litter in his parking lot and vandalism to his son’s car.

“I wish the government, the state, would find a way to deal with these guys,” he said. “They have a right to make a living. My mother and father didn’t stand on street corners. I understand why these guys get frustrated. You have to make them legal, give them a piece of paper that makes them legal. This way, they are outlaws. If you put somebody in an outlaw position, they are going to do a crime.”

Calderon, a stocky, voluble man in a cap and sweat pants, interrupted.

“Why does he think it was us that damaged his son’s car?” he said. “He assumes it was us. He knows we wouldn’t do anything to his car, because we have to stand here every day looking for work and we don’t want to cause any problems for ourselves.”

But before Simione went back to his restaurant and Calderon went off to another corner, the two men agreed on one thing.

“They should have a hiring center where they can come together,” Simione said.

How 3 Areas Reacted

AGOURA HILLS:

The City Council adopted an ordinance banning day laborers from soliciting work from streets and parking lots. Measure also applies to employers. A city-sponsored phone bank to match day laborers with employers opened in June.

SANTA CLARITA:

The City Council, after declaring 20 months earlier it would seek a “humane solution” to the day laborer problem, in April scrapped plans to open a hiring site. Instead, the council called on the Immigration and Nationalization Service to conduct more sweeps in the city to round up illegal aliens.

TOPANGA CANYON:

The Topanga Town Council, citing fear of fires in the canyon, urged the public to call the council hot line to report encampments of day laborers. An activist group, responding to threats from critics, in March shut down a soup kitchen it had opened to feed day laborers.

A Changing Population

Traditionally, the average day laborer has been a young, single, male immigrant from Mexico, recently arrived in the United States for the first time. Because laborers have tended to be undocumented, have little education and speak little English, the only way for them to eke out a living has been by becoming street vendors or day laborers, according to a 1986 study done at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.

About 97% of the men interviewed for the study had been looking for work on the street for less than three years and had not held other jobs in the United States. When they worked, they earned an average of $40 a day in construction, gardening or maintenance jobs. But day laborers often go weeks without being hired, since only about 15% of the men on a given street corner find work on an average day, according to experts.

But several economic and social forces are changing the portrait of the typical day laborer. The national economic recession has reduced job opportunities for all working people. Some immigrants who were in the mainstream work force--like factory workers and cleanup crews in the hard-hit construction industry--are being pushed out. Day laborers are more likely to be older than in the past, and to have been in the country longer--family men in their 30s and 40s who previously held regular jobs.

Economic hard times also help explain why it is no longer true that most day laborers are illegal immigrants. Legal and illegal immigrants alike are affected by a recession that has restricted their economic mobility. In addition, a growing number of day laborers are Salvadorans and Guatemalans. Many have gained political asylum or temporary legal status that enables them to live and work in the United States.

Another reason why the day laborer population has changed is the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986. Toughened sanctions against employers who hire undocumented immigrants mean fewer are being hired. And some advocates say that the law has caused discrimination, making employers reluctant to hire Latino immigrants in general, regardless of their immigration status.