Article in today’s Baltimore Sun:
Look no further to see the clash of these divergent views than to Gaithersburg, a Montgomery County community of 58,000 that has been divided over a day laborer center.
On its face it’s a conflict over whether workers, many of them suspected to be illegal, should be allowed to congregate on a corner to find work. But the debate in Gaithersburg encapsulates the thorny questions of illegal immigration being confronted nationwide: the impact of a growing Latino presence, debates over how and where English is spoken, concerns about whether immigrants are taking jobs away from natives or if immigrants are simply doing work Americans won’t.
Recently, simmering tensions bubbled over when Gaithersburg police threatened to jail men found congregating at a shopping center parking lot where they frequently wait for employers to hire them.
Please, it’s not like the police just up and had this idea all by themselves. The police were acting on a request from a property owner to enforce trespassing laws. Let’s have a show of hands from all of you who would prefer that the police refuse to remove someone who decided to spend his or her days lounging in your back yard without your permission.
The workers have since moved a block away, while city leaders and residents remain at odds over whether the city should fund a center for them. At the proposed center, laborers could learn English and job skills, similar to others operated in the state by the immigrant advocacy group CASA of Maryland.
Although a CASA-style center was one of the options considered in the report of the City’s Day Labor Task Force, this option was ranked at the bottom of the list of pro-active options. The preferred alternative was a center that limited itself to employment services and English language courses; laborers would be referred to the many other existing social service agencies for all other needs. As far as I know there is no concrete proposal to go beyond this.
But residents like Stephen Schreiman, who heads the Maryland chapter of the Arizona-based vigilante group the Minutemen Civilian Defense Corps, object to local funds being used for such a center. Schreiman said Minutemen members occasionally monitor the site, hoping to identify employers who hire illegal workers in the hopes of filing a civil suit against them.
“I’m opposed to taxpayer money being spent on criminal activity, first of all,” he said. “But I’m also opposed to the fact that the end result is these people are being hired by contractors and businesses at substandard wages, and they cannot earn a reasonable living.”
He said the influx of illegal immigrants has resulted in illegal boarding homes that are an eyesore.
“People feel they have lost their neighborhoods,” he said.
Pastor David Rocha, who two years ago began providing coffee and breakfast to laborers congregating a block from his church, Camino de Vida United Methodist Church, agrees that laborers are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers but believes they have been made the scapegoat.
“This is about the lack of leadership in the city,” said Rocha, who worked as a day laborer when he first came to the United States from Colombia 12 years ago. “It is about discrimination, about racism. It is about fairness.”
Rocha and Torres are of course the first to play the race card, as if day laborers or illegal immigrants were a race unto themselves. Personally, I believe that I have neither said nor written anything that disparages legal immigrants or laborers who seek employment in a non-intrusive manner. Although I am aware there exist extremists who feel that all Latino immigration — or even just all immigration — is harmful, I believe that this is completely irrelevant to the debate over labor centers, or even, to the extent that the issues overlap, illegal immigration. The constant hammering on race by advocates such as Mr. Rocha is harmful and counter-productive. If Mr. Rocha wishes to help the laborers, he should himself search around for some place that does not intrude on the peace of a residential neighborhood or private commercial property (e.g. a State-owned park-and-ride lot) and move the laborers there while he teaches them about American customs — something that should present a far smaller hurdle than the English language — and conducts quiet, non-confrontational negotiations with a city government that has already conceded the need for a center that will address the most critical needs of this small community. The fact that he stands his ground and refuses to address the concerns of the people impacted by the behavior of some of the laborers (as well as others drawn to an area where loitering is tolerated) suggests to me that he is less interested in helping the laborers than he is in getting his name in the paper.
