Day Laborers Squeezed on Two Sides

Legal Crackdown, Job Slump Coincide

By sunup every day last month, the parking lot between a filling station and a paint store in Fairfax County was scattered with Latino men, many wearing clean white shirts and pants in hopes of landing a day's work painting apartment walls. They yawned, joked and sipped coffee, but their faces were hard with worry.

"I have never seen so many men out here before or so few trucks," said Vicente Crespo, 37, a Salvadoran who shares an apartment with six other Latino immigrants, five of them in the country illegally. "A year ago, I was working all month and getting $15 an hour. Now, if I'm lucky, I get a job for a few hours and they pay $10."

The reason for this growing job scarcity -- described by immigrant day laborers, counselors and employers throughout the Washington suburbs -- is an economic and legal double whammy. A sharp regional downturn in housing construction has coincided with increased government pressure on employers not to hire illegal immigrants, who have traditionally gravitated to building and remodeling jobs.

The result, they said, has been a domino effect in which spooked employers are firing skilled workers with dubious identification, who in turn are flooding street corners and job programs. There they compete with casual workers for less-skilled jobs, accepting ever lower wages and shorter hours out of desperation.

Crespo and others said the dual squeeze has dramatically changed the atmosphere and tactics of their daily job search. Before, a contractor's van would pull into a parking lot outside a gas station or convenience store. A dozen men would stroll over and bargain for a few moments over wages and hours. Now, they said, there is often a mad scramble, with everyone looking over his shoulder for police cars or immigration vans.

"There's no time to negotiate. You just grab the door handle and jump in," Crespo said. The workers still share housing and beers, hair-raising tales of desert border crossings from Mexico and photos of wives and children back in Central America. But out in the parking lot, he said, "it's every man for himself."

Latino workers expressed confusion and alarm over a bewildering variety of recent government actions designed to curb illegal immigration. In Virginia, several jurisdictions have passed or are considering measures to deny public services to illegal immigrants and empower police to arrest them. A new federal law would allow employers to be prosecuted and fined if they ignore official letters warning that some workers have false or stolen Social Security cards.

Many of the new measures have not been implemented, but the perception of a crackdown has had a palpable chilling effect. At the same time, the immigrants are finding fewer and fewer safe places to seek work. In Maryland, they are welcome at the network of job placement centers operated by the nonprofit agency CASA of Maryland, but in Virginia, the only such center, in Herndon, was besieged by controversy and shut its doors last month, leaving workers to fend for themselves.

At one informal pickup spot next to a gas station in Annandale, where dozens of jobless Latino men gathered last month, several said police were following contractors' vans and giving them tickets if they lingered too long. They said the only way to guarantee a day's work was to arrange by phone to meet a previous employer at another spot.

"We all have to have cellphones now," said German Reyes, 58, a former hospital worker from Mexico who came to Virginia in 2000, hoping to earn a better living in construction. A year or two ago, Reyes said, work was "abundant" in new housing developments, and he could make about $500 a week. Now he is reduced to part-time remodeling for less than half that amount.

The construction downturn alone has badly hurt the immigrant population, which constitutes about 14 percent of the industry's workforce, according to the Pew Hispanic Center in the District. Housing starts nationwide are down 27 percent from two years ago, according to the National Association of Home Builders. In the Washington area, single-family housing starts are at their lowest point since 1992.

The industry slump and the tough new laws against hiring illegal immigrants have particularly affected large construction companies, which hire for longer periods than small contractors, keep more written records and have more to lose if they get in trouble. Big builders are especially worried about the new federal "no-match" law -- temporarily halted by a lawsuit -- that warns them when workers have bad Social Security cards and exposes them to legal prosecution if they fail to fire those workers.