Thread: Day Laborers not having much luck these days

Laborers not having much luck these days

By Rick Badie
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://www.ajc.com/print/content/printe ... e0906.html
Published on: 09/06/07

Times sure have changed on the boulevard.

Jimmy Carter Boulevard, that is.

There was a time day laborers would practically hop into my truck bed as soon as I pulled into the Dunkin' Donuts located next door to the U-Haul store.

I junked that truck, after 280,000 miles, and bought a car. I stopped by the doughnut shop Wednesday to witness a scene entirely different compared with years past.

And it wasn't because of the car I drove.

Sometimes you don't need statistics to get the picture. Anecdoctal obser- vations can suffice just fine. So on Wednesday, the Badie Tour stopped by the doughnut shop to find out what's going on with the day laborers, where they've gone.

This particular Dunkin' Donuts, as well as the QuikTrip off South Norcross Tucker Road, once teemed with day laborers. You had to walk around them to get inside the business. Not anymore.

Around 8 o'clock Wednesday morning, only seven men were looking for work. Most said they'd arrived at the parking lot early that morning but had no luck.

In the mid-1990s, rumor had it that a sign along the Mexican/U.S. border advertised Gwinnett County as the place to go for jobs. Maybe that's changed. Maybe we aren't so thirsty for cheap labor to exploit anymore.

I met two Hispanic men Wednesday who offered their perspectives. Sergio Guevara, 38, of El Salvador, and Gustavo Varala, 23, of Mexico.

Day laborers, they told me, are packing up. They're moving to states like North Carolina, Virginia —- returning, even, to their native countries. Crackdowns on illegal immigration and a stalled economy have some packing up.

Guevara is a mechanic who's on the pathway to citizenship, thanks to his wife, a Puerto Rican. His livelihood revolves around the Hispanic community, though, and as of late it's been tough going.

"In Georgia, so many problems," said Guevara, who stopped by for a cup of joe. "If you don't have papers, there's no work. The people are going because there's no work. It's very hard."

Varala, an illegal immigrant who's been here two years, says he hasn't worked in days.

"I wouldn't tell anyone in Mexico to come here," he told me.

Last year, I wrote a column about illegal immigrants who had made contingency plans in the midst of all the immigration reform rhetoric. If parents were deported, their children were to stay with legal relatives and friends.

So even if the men, and in some cases the women, are indeed leaving Gwinnett, many offspring are staying put.

So many of us view the end of illegal immigration as the magic bullet that will help upright a county that's been on warp speed for decades. In truth, the root of many of the quality-of-life issues is due to a region that grew so large, so quickly, seemingly with scant introspection.

No doubt, illegal immigration is an issue. But what's equally pressing are skyrocketing foreclosures, a loss of housing value in certain ZIP codes, traffic, packed schools and overdevelopment.

You can't lay those woes on the men looking for work on the boulevard. And now, even some of them are taking flight.

> Rick Badie's column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail rbadie@ajc.com.

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