America´s Hispanics: Casual workers – In the shadows
THE JUNCTION OF De Vargas and Guadalupe Streets, near the historic centre of Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been a place to trade labour for hundreds of years. Each morning dozens of men gather, waiting for professional builders or householders to pull up, offering work for a few hours or a day. Latinos call such casual labour “work on the corner”. Santa Fe’s chosen corner dates back to the days of Spanish colonial rule; the start of the old royal road to Mexico City is close by. Less picturesque corners are found across America. Often day labourers (or jornaleros) gather near home-improvement stores. The sight of such men, stamping workboots against the cold or sweating in mid-summer, is for many Americans the most visible reminder that millions of migrants live among them, outside the law.
Scores of state and city ordinances have been passed in recent years to stop day labourers from seeking work in the open. Anti-immigration activists have picketed sites, demanding that residency laws be enforced. When more liberal cities either tolerate day labour or designate special sites for hiring such workers, they trigger talk of creating “magnets” for illegal incomers.
In fact, the day-labour market is smaller than its high profile would suggest. A study in 2006 by the University of California, Los Angeles, based on a coast-to-coast survey of hundreds of sites, concluded that on a given day about 118,000 workers were looking for casual work. About a quarter of those surveyed had legal residency or passports.
Jornaleros take immigration law seriously, but as a background risk, like lightning that might strike from a threatening sky. Day-to-day, the sight of a police car is no reason to panic. Since 1999 Santa Fe—a small, Democratic-run city surrounded by a more conservative state—has barred the use of city resources to detect or detain people on the basis of their immigration status alone. Several other “sanctuary cities” have similar rules, including such giants as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Life in Santa Fe’s grey economy is strikingly businesslike. Several jornaleros called it “peaceful”. If migrants do not cause trouble, immigration agents and police leave them alone, says Alfredo Romero, a 29-year-old from Guatemala. Before the recession and a local housing crash there was “work every day, if you wanted”, he recalls, as wet snow falls. Now times are harder. Normal pay rates are $10-12 an hour, but in freezing weather there may be no jobs for days.
Crucially, unlike neighbouring Arizona or Texas, New Mexico grants driving licences to undocumented residents. The state’s Republican governor, Susana Martinez, has tried several times to revoke that licence law, calling it a threat to public safety, but has been thwarted by Democratic state legislators.
The financial crisis closed the construction firm that had employed Jaime Nuñez, a Mexican stonemason, for ten years. Mr Nuñez secured permanent residency during a 1986 immigration amnesty (“from Ronald Reagan, my best friend”). Having legal papers makes it harder to find work, he claims: employers know they can treat undocumented men “how they like”.
American bosses are more honest than fellow Latinos, ventures Epifanio López, who left Chihuahua six years ago. He shares a house with his wife and two other couples, paying $700 a month. A companion speaks of surviving the winter like “little ants”, on savings from the summer. The open-air site is not comfortable, concedes Mara Taub, a white-haired community advocate for the labourers, but it is safer for the workers, who can make themselves scarce “if a certain sort of government car” were to turn up.
An orderly queue
Nearly a thousand miles due west, in southern California, Burbank takes a different approach. The city obliged Home Depot, a do-it-yourself chain, to cede a corner of its car park to a “Temporary Skilled Workers Centre” run by the Catholic Charities of Los Angeles. A high fence surrounds the neat compound, which jornaleros have planted with shrubs and a flowering bougainvillea. It is kitted out with an office, a bathroom and rows of metal picnic tables outside. A shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe had to be dismantled after anonymous complaints.
Men (they are almost always men) must arrive before 6.10am to enter a daily lottery for work. On a sunny winter Saturday a steady flow of locals drives into the centre’s pick-up lane. A woman in a BMW wants a mirror installed. A building contractor in a truck needs help with dry-walling. All must deal with a manager, José Peres, a small bulldog of a man, who agrees pay rates before calling workers forward. On pain of expulsion, nobody may rush employers’ cars. On a typical day 30 workers turn up, and almost all find some work.
Jorge García, a 47-year-old from Mexico, used to work in hotel maintenance but could not survive on the minimum wage. “Some people think we don’t pay taxes, but most of us do,” he says. He pays up as “evidence” of good behaviour in case of a future immigration amnesty. Tax authorities will issue an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) to workers without legal status. Like many migrants, Mr García sends money home, as much as $200 a week, to pay for his two daughters to go to university. He has not seen them for ten years, except on Skype.
Two similar centres closed in recent years, sending jornaleros onto street corners amid reports of gambling and fights. The cities that were funding the centres found them too expensive, says Margaret Pontius of Catholic Charities. She detects a not-in-my-backyard mood. “People get incensed because those ‘terrible people’ are in their neighbourhood,” she says. But Burbank’s centre flourishes because it is known to be orderly. In a country with millions living in the shadows, such dilemmas abound.
