I like this guy! I think he is one to something!

http://www.postherald.com/me061305.shtml

Wielding a camera
Campaign against day labor doesn't please authorities
By DANIEL CONNOLLY
BIRMINGHAM POST-HERALD
One photograph shows Hispanic day laborers pulling down the brims of their baseball caps to hide their faces.
In another shot, a middle-aged woman sits at the wheel of a sedan with a concerned look on her face. Two day laborers are visible in the back seat.

Another photo shows a man leaning out a vehicle's window to give the camera a middle-fingered salute.

All the photos were taken by Dennis Burgess, who's trying to stem the day labor market on Hoover's Lorna Road by photographing the people who pick up immigrant workers. He wants to dry up the jobs so the day laborers, many of whom are here illegally, go home.

"The federal government wants to say it's not their problem that all these folks are here," he said. "The local government says, well, we're waiting for federal direction. But I'm not restrained by any of them. I'm just going out there, and if I can make a little bit of a difference every time I go out there. ..."

In practice, his effort involves standing near the day laborers until an employer pulls up. Then he moves forward to photograph the negotiations and the vehicle's license plate with his digital camera. He sometimes argues with day laborers and the people who pick them up. He counts it as a victory when a contractor chooses not to drive off with a worker.

The Hoover police haven't been happy with his one-man campaign. Neither are some of the day laborers. There's also the matter of the gun he was carrying when police stopped him in May.

For several years, day labor has been a fact of life on Lorna Road. Nearly all the day laborers are new arrivals from Mexico and other Latin American countries.

Several have said in interviews that they entered the country illegally. But contractors and ordinary residents routinely pick them up to do a wide range of work. Efforts to restrict the day labor market to a sanctioned area in front of the Multicultural Resource Center on nearby government property in Hoover haven't succeeded.

Burgess is an avid Alabama football fan who is single and lives in an apartment in unincorporated Jefferson County outside Hoover. He said he'd served eight years in the Navy before returning to Birmingham. He usually does his photography on Fridays, his day off from his jobs at a company that prints checks and as a property manager for a real estate company.

He believes illegal immigrants are a drain on education and health resources. He said employers who use illegal immigrant labor have an unfair advantage over those who follow the law.

"I acknowledge, I admit that these guys are for the most part hard-working folks. But there's too many of them," Burgess said. "And you go by the philosophy, 'If you build it, they will come.' If there are folks out here that want to hire them, they're going to keep coming. And one way to counter that is, 'If you tear it down, they will leave.' "

His efforts to solve the problem on his own mirror the frustration of others across the nation who say the government is doing little to control illegal immigration. Earlier this year a group called the Minuteman Project organized a patrol of a patch of Arizona desert where immigrants cross regularly. The effort wasn't supported by the federal government but attracted widespread attention. Meanwhile, some states are trying to get ahead of the federal government in tightening enforcement. In November, voters in Arizona approved a bill that restricted some state services to illegal immigrants. Similar bills recently failed in Alabama and Colorado.

Burgess said he got interested in the issue some time ago after day laborers harassed his then-fiancee and her daughter when they tried to pump gas.

"You feel frustrated after a while. You've got to go out of your way to get gas to avoid some of these folks," he said. "You're dodging them when they're crossing the street."

He's not the only person in Hoover who's concerned about illegal immigration. The leading candidates in Hoover's mayoral campaign in 2004 made fighting illegal immigration a central issue. Soon after the inauguration of Mayor Tony Petelos, the city established its own Department of Homeland Security and Immigration. But the one-man department has no authority to enforce immigration law. And the federal agency that enforces immigration law is understaffed. In a February interview, Michael A. Holt, special agent in charge for the bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said there are only 39 federal immigration officers in Alabama, 28 of them in the port city of Mobile.

That's one officer for every 116,000 Alabama residents.

A 2003 report from the former Immigration and Naturalization Service estimated 24,000 illegal immigrants lived in Alabama in 2000. In interviews, immigration enforcement officials have said they focus on illegal immigrants involved in criminal activity.

Enforcement of immigration laws at work sites is rare. There were only 451 arrests at work sites nationwide in fiscal year 2002, compared with 17,552 in fiscal year 1997, according to federal statistics.

Employers must check documents to make sure people have the legal right to work in this country even if they're just hired for the day, said Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

"The common practice (in day labor) is they don't. But just as if you hired someone to work for you at your house from a day labor market, let's say, and they get hurt, you could be sued," he said.

Violations of immigration law tend to go hand-in-hand with violations of labor and safety standards, he said. And some contractors cheat day laborers by refusing to pay them, he said.

Despite the potential for violations of the law, enforcement actions on Lorna Road have been rare. In April 2004, federal immigration agents detained 27 suspected illegal immigrants near the Chevron station at the corner of Lorna Road and Patton Chapel Road.

Bob Berry, Hoover's director of homeland security and immigration, said he's not aware of another large sweep since then.

On April 12, Burgess made his first trip to take photos near the Chevron station.

Burgess said he planned to document the activity to send to the Internal Revenue Service.

But it's not clear that it's a violation of tax law to hire day laborers, Internal Revenue Service spokesman Dan Boone said. "You'd have to know all the facts and circumstances to be able to say black or white, yes it is, no it isn't," he said.

At any rate, Burgess said he hasn't sent any of the photos to the IRS.

But he's claimed smaller victories â€â€