Wealthy Town Will Help Illegal Immigrants Find Jobs : Glen Cove, N.Y.: Civic leaders work with Latino advocacy group to create and finance an employment office for the Central Americans.

As the early morning sky lightens over Glen Cove, a town with more than its share of multimillion-dollar estates, illegal immigrants seeking day labor begin to gather in the cool shadows along a shopping street.

The job seekers, most from El Salvador or Honduras, arrive singly and in small groups, on foot and in battered cars. Some sip coffee at Carmine’s Deli from “I Love NY” paper cups. All keep a sharp eye out for landscaping and construction contractors who drive by looking for workers.

In two hours, more than 50 of the job seekers--few of whom speak English and most of them illegal immigrants--are crowding a two-block stretch of Cedar Swamp Road.

Some shopkeepers feel they deter customers, and one even periodically sprays them with a hose. But the town of 24,000 on Long Island Sound has decided it can’t make the job seekers go away, so it may as well help them link up with employers.

The chamber of commerce, city council, contractors and job seekers have embraced a plan in which the town, working with a Latino advocacy group, is creating and financing an employment office for the Central Americans.

They are attracted by jobs tending the expansive lawns of mansions in Glen Cove, formerly the home of J. P Morgan, the Woolworths and other leading industrialists and businessmen. The town also has middle-class homes and a small public housing project.

In 1989, Glen Cove passed a traffic ordinance making it illegal to solicit in the street. The aim was to drive away the job seekers, but many stayed and the town was unable to bar those remaining from standing on the sidewalk to seek work, said Mayor Donald P. DeRiggi.

“They remain and it’s apparent they’re going to remain and we are now looking to manage that group in a more acceptable way,” DeRiggi said. “We’re hoping this will be an answer.”

The town is using $25,000 in commissions from bond sales to set up the job office in a leased trailer on a former used car lot in an industrial section.

The mayor acknowledges that illegal immigrants will inevitably be among the job seekers who meet contractors there. But DeRiggi said it’s not up to local government to enforce immigration laws.

“That is up to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to enforce,” he said. “We had periodically called them . . . and their answer to us was that they’re terribly overworked.

“We cooperate and if we know of a situation where a person is undocumented, we can contact the INS. But we can’t question somebody and say ‘OK, let me see your papers.’ ”

A philanthropic group is giving $7,500 to hire an outreach worker for the office, said Pascual Blanco, the executive director of the Hispanic advocacy group, La Fuerza Unida de Glen Cove.

Blanco hopes that by having contractors meet job seekers, they will be less likely to take advantage of the workers. Some have failed to pay them after a day’s work.

“They’ve got rights like anyone else, even though some of them are illegal aliens,” said Terry Perez, a La Fuerza Unida leader.

“Some employers make you sweat blood, telling you to work harder,” said Mario Echeverria, one of the men standing in front of Carmine’s Deli. But Echeverria, trying to support his wife and nine children in Atiocoyo, El Salvador, said he would take any work after going jobless for weeks.

A landscaper pulls up in front of an athletic goods store next door and the men crowd around. But he is looking for a particular worker, Luis, whom he’d hired before.

Edgardo Paz, who hadn’t worked in 18 days, said some of his relatives in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, want to follow him to America, but he is discouraging them.

“Why should they come?” asked Paz. “If I’m suffering, why should they come and suffer too?”

Even so, few job seekers say they will return home soon. Here they can earn $60 a day, the equivalent of three weeks’ wages in Honduras.

“I’ll go back when they put cotton in my nose,” said Camilo Cano, of La Ceiba, Honduras, describing the way morticians prepare bodies.

Minutes later he hopped into his car and followed a pickup truck to a job site.