NEWS ANALYSIS : INS Probe of Strikers Puts Spotlight on Hiring Habits : Labor: Federal investigation of O.C. drywall workers raises bigger question of reliance on illegal immigrants.

For decades, Southern California has relied on cheap immigrant labor to build homes, tend gardens and fry fast food. Many of the men and women doing this low-wage work have come here illegally.

Illegal-immigrant labor is like the proverbial elephant in the living room--everybody knows it is there but most pretend not to see it. But last week, the elephant raised up and roared through the Orange County building industry when 153 striking drywall workers were arrested on trespassing charges.

Sheriff’s deputies jailed the drywall workers, alleging they had rushed a Mission Viejo construction site as part of a larger labor protest focusing on low wages and long hours. Things got more complicated, however, when federal investigators accused 86 of the workers of being illegal immigrants.

Suddenly, a routine labor dispute--already stoked by a relentless recession--became inflamed by issues of immigration.

And now, the heat has begun to spread:

* Federal officials find themselves forced to either deport some of the drywall hangers--cruel punishment in the eyes of civil-rights leaders--or knowingly allow illegal immigrants to go free.

* The drywall subcontracting firms that employed the workers are worried that they could be penalized under the Immigration Reform Act of 1986 if it can be proven that they knowingly hired illegal immigrants.

* Union leaders who normally embrace such a strike must decide if they want to represent some of the same workers who helped break the back of the drywall unions 10 years ago by agreeing to work faster and cheaper.

“California and our nation in general suffers from a terrible case of schizophrenia when it comes to immigrants,” said Msgr. Jaime Soto, a Catholic prelate counseling the drywall workers. “They need them but there is an anxious ambivalence about their presence here.”

The Building Industry Assn. says that the policy and practice of its members is to obey all labor laws, including those governing the minimum wage and the hiring of foreign workers.

Paid by the square foot, laborers say their average weekly income is about $300.

Drywall work involves lifting slabs of plaster and paper weighing more than 100 pounds and nailing them to interior wood frames. Workers then tape the seams and paint over the walls.

About 1,000 drywall hangers throughout Southern California walked off the job more than a month ago, demanding higher salaries, better working conditions and the right to be represented by a union.

The Mission Viejo arrests, however, have helped to confuse the issues.

The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service is now a central player in the drywall walkout, and 86 of the 153 men arrested are in that agency’s custody, awaiting deportation.

“We don’t get involved in laborers’ or strike situations as a rule,” said Robert Moschorak, district director of the INS office in Los Angeles. “These people came to our attention at the jail, which is quite different than INS arresting people on a strike line.”

Originally, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had arrested the laborers on suspicion of kidnaping because they allegedly had intimidated six non-striking workers into leaving the Mission Viejo site, but the district attorney’s office later dismissed those charges.

“If the police made some kind of a questionable arrest, it would not preclude INS from proceeding with deportation hearings,” said Moschorak. “We are trying to do our job. . . . As a normal course of operations, we check people booked into the jail to see if they are in the country illegally.”

Some immigrant rights officials claim that the INS is simply being used as a strikebreaker. They fear that many families--including those with children born here--will be torn apart if some of the protesters are deported.

“Most of the men have families here,” said Nativo Lopez, national co-director of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional, a nonprofit immigrant rights organization. “Most of them have U.S.-born children. With the breadwinner being deported, that pretty much leaves the family in a destitute situation.”

The drywall workers’ families--documented and undocumented--claim the men have done nothing wrong and are being punished for simply demanding a better wage.

“They didn’t do anything. They just want their rights. Is that a crime?” asked Maria Segura, the wife of one Fullerton drywall worker recently released from jail. “I have my heart in my hands. Please help us.”

Moschorak said Friday that the INS will investigate any drywall contractor that “knowingly” employed an illegal immigrant.

“We do know that there are a lot of people who come here without documents and acquire fraudulent documents at low cost and utilize those documents to gain employment,” Moschorak said.

Michael Potts, executive secretary of the Building and Construction Trade Council of Orange County, an AFL-CIO office, claimed the construction business is a source of employment for many illegal immigrants.

“It’s just common knowledge that there are several industries within the residential home building business that are magnets for illegal immigration, and it’s encouraged,” Potts said. “The subcontractors like those employees because they can’t complain.”

BIA projects manager Bob Nastase, however, said last week that his industry is being singled out unfairly.

“If you are going to distinguish the building industry as different from the rest of Southern California (about the hiring of illegal immigrants), that is an unfair comparison,” he said.

The Orange County Human Relations Commission in a 1989 report entitled “Zero Dollars Per Hour” criticized employers in general for a variety of labor abuses. But it was the construction business, and drywalling in particular, that took a lot of heat.

“Cash pay is rampant, particularly in construction,” the report says, adding that “payment in drugs is common in the cash pay game, particularly in the drywall and framing industries.”

The strikers say they were offended by some of the report’s findings.

Latino labor leaders say the Mission Viejo arrests are a stinging symbol of Orange County’s hypocrisy when it comes to immigrant laborers.

“There is a double standard. American society loves Mexicans. They love Mexicans as long as they are working for sub-minimum wages, as long as they don’t complain,” said Jose L. De Paz, executive director of the California Immigrant Workers Assn. “Once they start asking for things within their rights, Mexicans become the enemy.”

Soto said he worries that the jailing of the workers--along with possible deportation--will force thousands of other illegal immigrants to continue to quietly endure labor abuses. Soto calls it “living in the shadows.”

“Immigrant workers will think twice before reporting the non-payment of wages, dangerous working conditions or other forms of labor exploitation,” he said.

One helping hand may come from unions. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the United Farm Workers have previously organized illegal immigrants, and a local Orange County carpenters union is loaning out its hall to the drywall hangers.

But the same men now asking for a union helped break drywall unions a decade ago. Nevertheless, labor leaders and academics say it’s in a union’s interest to let bygones be bygones.

“From (the union’s) standpoint, they would be better to take them in-house rather than have them as a potential problem,” said Leo Troy, a labor law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Soto said he has been saddened by the Mission Viejo arrests and the controversy that has accompanied them.

“Whether someone is legally here or not does not absolve us from according that person full protection under the law,” he said.

The Mexican immigrant community’s “dedication to work and family, its aspirations and its dreams, are not in conflict with the future prosperity of California,” Soto said. “They are very much in harmony with it.”