Thread: Man patrols, petitions to ban day laborers from parking lot

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Man patrols, petitions to ban day laborers from parking lot


By Elena Gaona
STAFF WRITER

August 22, 2006


RAMONA – Clint Hamilton says he'd rather be playing softball with his 10-year-old daughter.

Instead, the Ramona resident said “patriotic duty” pushes him to spend at least 20 hours a week trying to stop day laborers from gathering outside the downtown grocery store where he once shopped.

A one-man Minuteman army, Hamilton videotapes and photographs people hiring workers and said he's been criticized and threatened.
“All I ask them to do is get out of our parking lot,” he said.

Hamilton, 44, speaks in calm tones and wears a U.S. Border Patrol baseball cap. “I'm basically a nice guy,” he said.

Outside a doughnut store in the shopping center, men gathered for coffee on a recent morning said they don't see Hamilton that way.

“He's just racist,” said Antonio Murillo, 75, who buys a pastry and a cup of coffee and spends his mornings chatting with the workers, something he said he has done each morning for more than 15 years.

A retired plumber, Murillo said he feels targeted by Hamilton's cameras because Murillo is Latino. He's a legal U.S. resident, he said, pulling out his residency card. It's not true, as Hamilton contends, that the workers leer at women or urinate in the alley, Murillo said.


Day-labor division
Nationwide and throughout North County, day-labor sites like the one in Ramona have become the most visible staging ground of the illegal immigration debate. In Vista, a day-labor ordinance that requires would-be employers to register with the city is being contested in court.
But how such sites are viewed often depends on who is viewing them. Though he is loosely a member of the San Diego Minutemen, Hamilton prefers acting alone, he said.

He grew up near San Ysidro and served two years in the U.S. Army as a combat medic before returning to run his own construction-related business in San Diego. About 16 years ago he and his wife, Lynnette, bought a house on a one-acre lot in Ramona where they could keep their horses and raise a family, Hamilton said.

The growing number of Latinos looking for work outside his neighborhood Albertsons prompted him to shop elsewhere and begin his protest.

He isn't bothered by the men's legal status, he said.

“I don't like the way they make the street look. We have a beautiful little town in Ramona, and we don't need 100 loitering men,” Hamilton said.

For months, Hamilton has protested by himself at the hiring site. He started off carrying a sign that read “Hire a Patriot, Not an Illegal.”

He and the day laborers both said they yell at each other in the parking lot.

Hamilton sends videotapes and photographs he takes of landscapers, homeowners and other employers picking up the day laborers to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.


Looking for support
Last month, he circulated a petition to close the hiring site among the nearly 20 businesses in the shopping center, and he said most signed. Last week, Hamilton began collecting more signatures on a petition asking elected officials “to close or move the illegal day-labor site.” His goal is 5,000 signatures.
One woman shopping at the center recently said the workers make her feel uncomfortable, and one said she feels perfectly safe. A third woman said she would never sign such a petition because the men have a right to look for work.

A manager of the Albertsons declined comment on Hamilton's efforts, while Christina Tran, the co-owner of the doughnut shop, refused to sign his petition, saying the workers are good customers.

“Petitions don't trump constitutional rights,” said Claudia Smith, director of the nonprofit Border Project with the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation.

She monitors the Ramona site and said she personally helped many of the men there gain legal status. She often tells them they have the right to look for work on public sidewalks, as long as they don't block cars or pedestrians.

Hamilton is using “the tactics of a school yard bully,” Smith said.

Employers are not always required to check immigration status when hiring someone to do casual labor in the home or for intermittent jobs, she said. Other times, she said, men may be picked up at the site for convenience, but contractors could have already checked their paperwork.

Hamilton has a meeting scheduled with county Supervisor Dianne Jacob in September to discuss the day labor site.

He's collected some 1,300 signatures so far and greets shoppers with a polite introduction. More than half of the people he approaches sign his petition, he said. Editorials and a cartoon in the Ramona Sentinel have praised his effort.

“I'm changing my hometown,” Hamilton said. “It feels good.”

Meanwhile, day laborers continue to shop and wait to be hired each morning at the shopping center, which includes a bank, a pharmacy and restaurants.

“We're not animals,” said day laborer Arturo Lozano, 39, of Mexico, who is undocumented. “I have a wife and three kids. I'm out here to support them.”

When Hamilton drives by with his camera, “I feel powerless because of the racism,” Lozano said. “No one deserves to be treated like a creature.”

Since Hamilton's efforts began, the number of employers coming to the site has plummeted, about a dozen men looking for work said recently. Five of them said they were legal residents, and three spontaneously showed documents.

Although some employers signal to them to meet at a nearby corner where they can pick them up without being photographed, the workers said Hamilton is threatening their livelihood.

Some of them said they simply stare at Hamilton and wonder why he hates them.

“I'm not a racist. I'm not against Mexicans,” Hamilton said. “I'm against loitering.”



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Elena Gaona: (760) 737-7575; elena.gaona@uniontrib.com

Who says one person can't make a difference. I do worry about his safety. To the guy who says day labors don't urinate in public, and harassas woman you must have the only ones on the face of the earth