December 19, 2009
Editorial
In a Day-Labor Corner
This fall, despite the warnings of civil-rights lawyers, Oyster Bay, on Long Island, adopted an ordinance. Among other things, it makes it illegal to wave your arms by the side of the road. The hope is that day laborers who gather on residential streets in the village of Locust Valley will go away rather than risk a $250 fine.

Oyster Bay is the latest community to grapple with two big questions vexing the suburbs: Who are all these day laborers, and should we welcome or expel them?

The short answers: They are your neighbors, and there are serious obstacles to driving them off the streets, starting with the Constitution. The town supervisor, John Venditto, says his lawyers have told him the anti-solicitation ordinance will withstand a legal challenge. The First Amendment and the growing pile of federal court rulings striking down similar ordinances around the country strongly suggests otherwise.

We sympathize with Mr. Venditto’s concerns for safety and order. Anyone who has seen the chaos of an unsupervised day-labor site knows how troubling they can be: men dashing into street, surrounding cars and trucks, snarling traffic and intimidating drivers. A site without amenities, where laborers linger all day with no shelter or toilets, creates serious problems of its own.

But jaywalking and obstructing traffic are already illegal, and people who recklessly endanger others should be ticketed. Even if the town conducts an empirical study to show that traffic laws are inadequate to preserve order, it is still inviting a lawsuit, which it would lose.

Mr. Venditto and the town board can accept that now or go to court and accept it later. Either way, they will end up where they started, trying to find a solution that is effective, fair and respectful of the law.

Mr. Venditto insists he’s not an immigration hard-liner. He says he understands the historic bonds that link today’s Hispanic immigrants with his own Italian ancestors. He should know, then, that encouraging laborers off the streets into a safe, well-managed hiring site is the best of an array of unsatisfying options.

There is no magic answer for desperation and poverty, and the broken-down anarchy of the federal immigration system will be with us for a while. The country is not about to lose its insatiable appetite for cheap labor or its core belief that this country was built by immigrants who started poor and worked their way up.

On the streets of Locust Valley, meanwhile, people are waiting for an answer that an unconstitutional silver-bullet anti-solicitation law will not provide.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/opini ... ?th&emc=th