Thread: East Hampton cracking down on undocumented workers

www.newsday.com

East Hampton begins patrolling train station as part of its campaign to stop the hiring of undocumented workers

BY BART JONES
STAFF WRITER

November 15, 2005

The two Ecuadorean day laborers were standing outside the East Hampton train station yesterday at 7:15 a.m. hoping for a daily job in construction, landscaping, painting or anything.

But thanks to an aggressive campaign by the East Hampton Village Police Department aimed at cracking down on undocumented workers and the people who hire them, they were out of luck.

"We can't work because the contractors are afraid," one of the immigrants, Andres, 58, said in Spanish, nervously eyeing a patrol car down the street and declining to give his last name.

The effort is the latest salvo fired in the battle about day laborers in Suffolk County, where a crackdown on illegally overcrowded housing in Farmingville has led to the eviction of scores of Latino immigrants since the summer.

"Everyone up there is committing federal violations that we have no authority to enforce," Police Chief Gerard Larsen Jr. said.

The alleged offenses range from paying workers in cash off the books to immigrants being in the country illegally, he said.

While the train station on Railroad Avenue normally attracts about 80 day laborers on a typical summer day and about 30 in the fall, yesterday there were no more than a half-dozen and barely a contractor to be seen.

The campaign officially kicked off yesterday with a police car parked at the train station from 6 to 11 a.m. An officer was assigned to take photographs of the license plates of any vehicle whose occupants stopped to pick up a day laborer. Larsen said the photographs would be sent to the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and the New York State Department of Labor, agencies he hopes will investigate the contractors and help keep them out of East Hampton.

The campaign received mixed reactions from residents.

Some hailed it as an overdue measure needed to eliminate a public nuisance, curb illegal activities and enhance the community's quality of life. Others called it futile, asked why authorities don't go after other off-the-books businesses such as restaurants, and predicted the workers will simply shift to another location because they are a backbone of the economy.

"I'm for it," said Christine Moran, who works in a nearby auto repair business. "I'm a taxpayer and they're not taxpayers. What would you do if there were a bunch of prostitutes on the street waiting all day?"

But John Brown, 32, a local artist who was passing by the site yesterday, called the crackdown "completely wrong. I think the answer is having a place for them to be ... Every Irish kid who comes here is working off the books. I think it is totally discriminatory."

Larsen said he is not planning to target restaurants because he has received no complaints about them, adding that the day laborer problem is "blatant." He also said "village residents do not want a day laborer hiring site in the village of East Hampton."

Isabel Sepulveda de Scanlon of the Latino advocacy group Organizacion Latino Americana countered that residents "want them [the workers] when they need them and then they should disappear."

Larsen said he has received numerous complaints from residents about the informal hiring site. "It's an unsightly situation that's increasingly getting larger and ... I feel we have a way to stop it," Larsen said

"We have to eat, we have to pay rent and help this country progress," said worker Andres.

"We have to eat, we have to pay rent and help this country progress," said worker Andres.

This guy's been listening to too many spanish speaking advocacy groups. He isn't helping this country progress in the least. GO BACK HOME!