Thread: Illegal Guatamalan Day Laborer 'Elves' Helping Santa

Nice try, Amigos!!! I hate to be the Grinch who stole Christmas...but aren't these little elves taking jobs away from American elves???


Sprucing up the streets
Day laborers clean up downtown to improve Hayward's image

By Matt O'Brien, STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 11/28/2007 07:20:53 AM PST


Like Santa and his merry elves, a green-vested volunteer team of Guatemalan day laborers came out of the shadows Tuesday morning to spread some holiday cheer.
No toys. Just lots of gum-scraping, leaf-raking, graffiti-busting and deep-cleaning of downtown sidewalks.

Carlos Alinan, wearing a T-shirt depicting characters from "A Garfield Christmas Special," hoped that his scrubbing of a grimy Main Street also carried a subtle message.

"We're trying to make a good impression," he said in Spanish. "Some people like us and some people don't."

His time in Hayward is temporary, he said. Like all of the Guatemalan men who talked about their motivations Tuesday, he said he entered the United States illegally hoping to lift his distant family out of poverty and then return home to them.

The group of about 15 mostly Mayan men gathered at Hayward City Hall — one referred to the airy building as the "palacio municipal," or municipal palace — and then fanned out across downtown streets.

They were helping to prepare the B Street business district for Thursday

evening's Light up the Season, an annual holiday bash.

"I think volunteering makes people feel part of something," said John White Jr., vice chair of the Keep Hayward Clean and Green Task Force, which joined the group effort Tuesday. So did a recently homeless man who wanted to help out.

"I think it's fantastic," said Allen Davidson of Eden Jewelry and Loan
Co. on Mission Boulevard. "They've got all the gum, scum and gunk off the sidewalk. Two thumbs up for that."
Davidson said that in recent debates over how to improve downtown, the homeless too often have been unfairly blamed for the struggling district's decline.

And, he added, he didn't care that most of the work was being done by illegal immigrants.

"They're scraping stuff the city cannot afford to clean," Davidson said.

Many downtown businesses participated by donating breakfast and lunch to the volunteers.

Other bystanders were thankful, but assumed that the vested men were jailbirds, doing the work because they had been sentenced to community service.

One pedestrian heckled.

"Go back to Tennyson," he muttered, referring to the road in South Hayward where most of the city's immigrant day labor population waits for work.

He declined to be interviewed, but engaged in a quick debate with Gabriel Hernandez, director of the Hayward Day Labor Center and one of the clean-up's chief organizers.

"I told him if he can organize me a group of volunteers like this, go ahead," Hernandez said.

Hernandez said all of the day laborers who utilize the city-sponsored work center, which opened over the summer, are asked to volunteer a few hours to improve local neighborhoods in return for the benefits the center provides.

The facility links short-time employers with workers, regardless of their legal status, and offers English classes and other services.

Two weeks ago, the center rented a power-sweeper and had a different group of workers — some volunteered twice — tidying up downtown streets.

"If you do two hours times 300 people, that's 15 weeks, almost four months," Hernandez said. "That's a lot of work."

Light up the Season happens Thursday beginning at 5:30 p.m. at sites throughout downtown, and culminates with a tree-lighting ceremony inside the Hayward City Hall Rotunda, 777 B St.


Reach Matt O'Brien at 510-293-2473 or mattobrien@bayareanewsgroup.com.

http://origin.insidebayarea.com/dailyre ... ci_7578878

I am a California native and this just makes me sick flaunting in our faces with illegals doing this work. It just goes to show what a gutless state we live in. I am so sick of this.

I wonder who put the gum and grafitti there in the first place?

Good! While they have them assembled send them to the border to clean up the 30 million pounds of trash left by illegal crossers.

This people have got some kinda PR group helping them.

This is a propaganda war. We are never going to get as much media coverage and certainly little or no positive media coverage.

WE have to fight other ways.

Elves??? More like Trolls, they even live under bridges out here.