Cities crack down on day laborer gathering spots

By Matt O'Brien, STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 04/30/2007 06:58:35 AM PDT

GAITHERSBURG, Md. — After nearly three years serving as the unwitting center of neighborhood attention, the day laborers of Olde Towne Gaithersburg suddenly disappeared this spring.
They stopped walking through the historic residential district of century-old homes near Route 355. They ceased hanging around in clusters outside a small shopping center while waiting for contract work.

"The problem is that people who lived in the community did not like day laborers walking up and down their streets," said Daniel Muller, who belongs to a Methodist church that provided workers with coffee and wintertime building access. "They contended that the day laborers urinated here and there and stories like that. None of this is documented. It's all stories."

But in Gaithersburg and communities across the country, the stories — and the visible presence of mostly Latino immigrant workers who entered the country illegally — were enough to force local leaders to take some kind of political action.

In many towns, the workers have become the local face of the country's increasingly vitriolic debate over illegal immigration. As that battle continues to escalate in the U.S. Congress, just 20 miles southeast of downtown Gaithersburg, the divisiveness in many local communities has grown.

"I think it's having a very, very negative effect on local attitudes, and it's coming about because of this total vacuum of federal policy," said Doris Meissner, a fellow at the Migration Policy Institute who was commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Clinton.
"My sympathies are with these local officials. They are faced with the daily realities of illegal immigration, and they're trying to do something."

Many local leaders increasingly see themselves accountable for immigration issues previously left to the responsibility of federal government.

Some law enforcement agencies, such as the sheriff's department in Mecklenburg County, N.C., have sought to partner with federal agents to help detain and remove illegal immigrants from the community. Many other law enforcement agencies have said they want no part of immigration enforcement, and the mayors of Oakland and San Francisco made national waves recently when they declared they would not put city resources into helping conduct raids.

The mayor of Hazleton, Pa., became a national figure and is considering a run for Congress after he cracked down last year on business owners and landlords who hire illegal immigrants.

"Illegal immigration is destroying small cities such as ours," said the mayor, Lou Barletta, speaking between interviews on conservative talk shows during a radio broadcast rally near the U.S. Capitol building last week. He said nearly 100 American cities are looking to copy his Hazleton ordinance, despite "attorneys from San Francisco and New York" who are fighting the local law in federal court.

In Herndon, Va., some voters were so upset about the town's taxpayer-funded day-worker center that they helped boot out of office the mayor and Town Council members who had established it just a year earlier.

Dave Kirby, one of the new council members swept into office last year, said the election was a referendum on the day labor controversy. In the year since he and like-minded members were elected, the town has passed an anti-solicitation ordinance, made English the official town language and signed its police department up for training classes with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"I'm a letter-of-the-law guy," Kirby said. "We have a pretty serious overcrowding problem in our town, and a lot of people don't want to admit that a lot of that has to do with the illegal aliens in town and the day labor center that attracts them."

The Herndon Day Labor Center continues to operate beneath a tent in a city-owned parking lot, but the town has threatened to close it off to all but those who can demonstrate legal documents.

For now, workers such as 33-year-old Jenrri Melendez, a native of San Vincente in El Salvador, keep coming to the center every day.

Melendez said he crossed through Guatemala and Mexico and into Texas to get to the United States. He tried working in Los Angeles for a time, but left for Virginia about a year ago and now lives with his brother, a carpenter who is in the country legally.

"There was little work (in California), and my brother told me there would be more work here," Melendez said. "The situation here is almost the same. I worked in a moving company, but that didn't work out because they started asking for papers."

Melendez's story is repeated by day laborers across the country, including many of those who wait in South Hayward for work every day. With the Hayward City Council's political and financial support, members of the South Hayward Parish recently opened a new day labor center that is modeled after others in the Bay Area.

"Some communities are coping in progressive ways," said Meissner, the former INS commissioner. "Those we tend not to hear about."

In Gaithersburg, an increasingly diverse city of 60,000 with a long-established Central American immigrant population, many argued that the solution to the day labor problem was an organized day labor center. But nobody wanted it near them.

"There was a very vocal group of people who basically are anti-immigrant, and just fought the city over every site," said Patrick Lacefield, who works in the executive administration office for Montgomery County, of which Gaithersburg is a part. "If the city chose a site, they went there and stirred things up. Finally, the city of Gaithersburg just said we think there should be something like this but we can't find a place for it."

County administrators found their own site, in an unincorporated region just outside town, and appropriated nearly $200,000 to run it through a local nonprofit.

Residents and officials say it is too early to determine if their solution is working. Day laborers were encouraged by church leaders and social workers to go to a new day labor center in unincorporated Montgomery County that opened April 16, but attendance has remained sparse.

A quick bus ride from their old gathering place, the new center is in a remote business park bounded by a railroad track and two freeways.

Muller, who had joined a citizen committee to help address the issue, said the center is an improvement over the chaotic job-seeking atmosphere of looking for jobs on the street and the community feud that caused.

"It's a good compromise," Muller said. "It's not walking distance, perhaps, from where they live, but it's a lot better than it was."


Matt O'Brien at (510) 293-2473 or mattobrien@dailyreviewonline.com.



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