Obscure Law Used to Jail Day Laborers in Georgia

When he took his place on the spit of concrete outside Country Boy Trailers, day laborer Felix Rodriguez Rodriguez was thinking he’d get a lift to work in the back of a pickup.

He rode away in a squad car instead.

Jailed over an obscure Georgia law now being used against day laborers, Rodriguez--an illegal immigrant from Oaxaca, Mexico--asked: “If it’s a crime to look for a job, then what’s not a crime?”

Forsyth County authorities said the issue wasn’t about jobs, but traffic. “These guys kept running into the road all helter-skelter,” said sheriff’s Capt. Frank Huggins, who helped organize the roundup last month of 30 laborers, all Latino. “And a lot of people around here don’t like their image.”

It’s the image of the South, no longer just black and white, that is coming into question as a massive wave of immigration tests how tolerant the region has become. The New South is a multicultural place, with growing Asian communities, hundreds of thousands of Latino immigrants, myriad languages and a much more complex racial dynamic.

Some cities such as Memphis, Tenn., and Birmingham, Ala., have absorbed the newcomers well. But in the Atlanta area, which bills itself as cosmopolitan, educated and all the rest, immigrants--especially Latinos--are facing more and more hostility.

This summer, several Atlanta suburbs began cracking down on day laborers, many of whom hail from Mexico. Some of these predominantly white areas have also instituted English-only sign laws, similar to ones struck down elsewhere as unconstitutional. Carlos Guevara, a Salvadoran minister, has been cited twice in Norcross, Ga., for advertising a church revival in Spanish.

During the 1990s, Georgia’s Latino population increased by 329%. Of 8.2 million Georgians, 5.3% listed themselves as Latino on the 2000 census. It’s a similar story in other Southern states, such as North Carolina, where the Latino population grew by 394%. Tennessee’s rocketed by 278%.

Many new arrivals came to fill the surplus of low-wage jobs gutting chickens, stitching carpets, hauling building supplies and cleaning kitchens.

The complaints about them are familiar: They deplete resources by filling up public schools; they take jobs from “real Americans”; they cause more than their share of crime.

In Atlanta, Latinos are increasingly visible targets. There are 21 Spanish-language periodicals and six Spanish-language radio stations. The percentage of Latino students in public schools has risen from 13.5% in 1994 to 41% today, according to the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Six of the city’s top 25 minority businesses are owned by Latinos.

“It’s like we’re becoming another Los Angeles,” complained Donna Locke, head of the Georgia Coalition for Immigration Reform, based in suburban Atlanta. “These Hispanics are trying to overwhelm us.”

Earlier in the year, a group of black state lawmakers also banded together to cut Latinos out of affirmative action programs.

“African Americans are still being disenfranchised,” said Democratic state Sen. Nadine Thomas. “Why all of a sudden are we going to empower another group?”

Because Latinos are classified as an ethnic group and not a race, Georgia’s race-oriented affirmative action programs don’t apply to them. “It’s sad,” said Teodoro Maus, a former Mexican diplomat and president of the Mexican American Business Chamber in Atlanta. “The gulf between blacks and Latinos is getting wider. It seems like everybody is nervous about how fast our community is growing.”

There’s nothing novel about a backlash against immigrants--10 years ago, similar resentment bubbled up in places such as California and New York. But here the sting is intensified by a legacy of bigotry.

Thirty miles north of Atlanta’s urban core, the ring of hammers and the pop-pop-pop of nail guns welcome you to Forsyth County. A woodsy, suburban area flush with million-dollar homes, it’s the second-fastest growing county in the nation. Many builders say the rapid growth was possible only because there were so many Mexican laborers willing to work for $10 an hour or less.

The county is still 95% white. Of its 98,407 residents, 689 are black and 5,511 are Latino--a 763% increase since the 1990 census. Forsyth was infamous during the Jim Crow era for banning black residents and planting signs along the road that told blacks to get out of town by sunset. During the 1980s, the county was the site of several violent Ku Klux Klan rallies.

Yesteryear’s attitudes still linger, many say.

“People look at me funny for hiring Mexicans, and I hear them say they won’t ride through their part of town,” said landscaping contractor Ken Buffington, who is white. “But they’re not crime people. They’re here to work.”

The Country Boy Trailer yard sports a big Confederate flag. Across Route 9, in a vacant lot, 75 paint-spackled men gathered on a recent morning. This is their spot, the slab of concrete that jornaleros, or day laborers, have claimed outside the small city of Cumming to continue a time-honored tradition they brought with them from the town squares of Mexico.

Every day except Sunday, they arrive at 6 a.m.--some with tools, some with lunches--and wait to get hired as roofers, grass cutters, carpenters and myriad other trades. It was still gray and wet outside when Buffington pulled up in a little blue pickup.

Then came the stampede. Even before the wheels stopped, a crowd of grown men rushed to his truck, pushing, pulling, twisting each other’s ears and playfully wrestling to get pole position outside his door.

“Y’all got to calm down!” Buffington yelled.

Two spry laborers leaped into the back of his truck. Twenty others waved their hands and shouted.

Huggins said several people have complained about men dashing into the road and jumping into trucks. That’s what led the Forsyth County sheriff to dust off a little-known 1974 state law that makes it a misdemeanor to solicit work alongside the road. It was written to crack down on panhandlers and squeegee guys in downtown Atlanta. Despite complaints from civil liberties groups that the law infringes on the rights of free speech and assembly, no one has emerged to represent the jornaleros. That’s another difference between the immigrant backlash here and in other places. It’s been unanswered so far.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund has just opened an Atlanta branch but hasn’t hired any lawyers yet. Other Latino advocates said they are too busy.

Twenty-five miles south in Marietta, Ga., police are breaking up day labor pools by targeting contractors, usually white. In the last month, 43 contractors have been cited for violating a local ordinance banning labor pools from any public space. Police Cmdr. Wayne Kennedy said day laborers are a nuisance because they litter and relieve themselves on the sidewalk.

“I guess it’s a cultural thing,” Kennedy said. “Probably in Mexico urinating on the sidewalk is perfectly normal.”

Kennedy said two laborers have been hit by cars in Marietta in the last three years. Police in nearby Norcross, Doraville and Smyrna also have reported problems and are trying various tactics to clear the men from the streets.

Places such as Los Angeles have tried similar measures and have been repudiated by the courts.

Last September, an L.A. County ordinance banning the solicitation of work from sidewalks and streets was struck down by a federal judge who said it violated the free speech rights of day laborers and contractors. “The problem with these ordinances is that they’re not motivated by legitimate concerns but by anti-Latino resentment,” said lawyer Thomas Saenz of MALDEF. “You’re not allowed to zone humanity.”

There are 20,000 jornaleros on the streets of Southern California. The number in Georgia, yet to be figured, probably runs close to 1,000. There are also several hundred day laborers in Memphis, Birmingham and Raleigh, N.C., but none has been arrested for soliciting work.

Many are subjected to dangerous conditions and are hired to perform jobs that other workers will not do. Many also complain of getting stiffed at the end of the day--and sometimes abandoned at a construction site.

Two Atlanta communities, Roswell and Duluth, recently opened day labor centers, orderly places off the street where contractors can find workers and workers can find services such as language classes and free lunches. But other cities are fighting such efforts; when the issue came up in Gainesville, not far from Cumming, a neo-Nazi group held a massive protest.

“The red-necking is really picking up in some places,” said Maus, the former Mexican diplomat. “And it’s such a contradiction. Everybody says how these guys are great workers. It’s like they want the hand, not the body.”

The other day, after Buffington drove off with a sinewy laborer in an Adidas tank top, the jornaleros drifted away from the road and back to their well-worn spots across from the trailer yard. A few passing cars swerved dangerously close to the group, apparently deliberately. One driver honked loud and long.

Rodriguez, 22, was among those left behind. But the moment a dump truck lumbered to a stop, he flung himself into the mass of men, shouting like the others, pumping his elbows and trying to catch the driver’s eye.

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Times researchers Edith Stanley and Scott Wilson contributed to this story.