Calling Long Island�s Better Angels

By: Milan Bhatt

While on the far end of the country, the city of Los Angeles this week passed a resolution requiring large home repair stores to construct hiring centers �a much celebrated victory�there was little relief in the faces of day laborers gathered this morning in a parking lot in Hempstead, Long Island, a town in Nassau County where our team kicked off our �Finding America� trip. After a fortuitous visit with Mario, a permanent resident of Dallas, originally from El Salvador, who shared wrenching accounts of hardship and loss back home spurring his own journey�by bicycle�to the DNC, we were led to the lot of a local Home Depot, where a mass of more than fifty workers huddled around us and shared details of their routine of waiting patiently, eagerly, and with increasing frustration for the opportunity to earn an honest day�s living, and moreover to actually be paid for it. Two years after advocates defeated the so-called �Standing While Latino� bill before the Suffolk Countylegisature, which sought to criminalize solicitation of work in such a manner, we learned that police often required day laborers in this particular lot to remain standing on the curbside while waiting to be tapped. And while police had entered into an agreement with this particular Home Depot, we learned that officers would occasionally bully workers in the lot. The biggest challenge by far though for the group, ranging in age from teen to fifty-two, was a basic task of finding work which has been become scarcer as the local economy has sputtered.

The reality in this part of New York has truly been a two-fold tale. Suffolk County, in stark contrast to its by-and-large sympathetic cousin to the west , Nassau, where we launched, has gone to great lengths in recent years to penalize hard working immigrants. Democrats and Republicans alike have outdone one another in cranking out anti-immigrant bills, each more far-reaching than its predecessor, with reckless disregard for deepening local recessions in what is combined, the nation's fourth largest economy. And just last month, Huntington Village passed an ordinance that will in fact impose a sizable criminal fine on day laborers � the cruel irony of making poverty a crime.

Pat Young, a �life-long Islander� and hero in the local immigrant rights movement, http://www.longislandwins.com/blog, referred in our interview today to the founding fathers and their plea to the better angels of our natures. Today in that parking lot we saw no criminals, only hard workers. Bravo to the City of Angels; Long Island, you can do better.