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New York Times on Long Island day laborers

Posted May 11, 2009 by Patrick Young, Esq.

The New York Times has a thoughtful piece by Lawrence Downes about the situation of day laborers on Long Island during the current recession. although these men helped build Long Island during the boom of the last twenty years, they have been repaid with distain. As Downes eloquently writes:
Long Island owes them gratitude, but — gratitude? Are you kidding? The men are lucky they aren’t being harassed and racially profiled by the police, swept into federal custody, as local authorities are doing to Latino immigrants across the country.
Suffolk County has begun a police crackdown on gangs and drugs in Huntington Station, which are a problem there, as in any poor community. But outreach to day laborers — to help them assimilate, find jobs or housing, or perhaps go home — is harder to find.
But there are rays of hope in the work like Sister Margaret Smyth:
In places like Huntington and Southampton, some residents are attacking the problem with level heads and kind hearts. Volunteers in Huntington house homeless laborers in churches every night, all winter. Sister Margaret Smyth, a Roman Catholic nun who has spent years serving the poor on the East End of Long Island, works with Southampton’s day laborers, fighting homelessness, hunger and wage theft.
“We’re getting more and more cases of workers not just underpaid, but just plain not being paid at all,” Sister Margaret said. “We take them to court. Poor Southampton court system, I must have 40 cases with them.”
Then the author joins in Sister Margaret’s prayer for a miraculous change of heart by the pols in Suffolk:
The immigration problem is far bigger than Sister Margaret. It’s a federal failure that has fallen into the laps of local governments. But reform is finally showing signs of moving forward in Washington, and local government would be smart to help it along, starting now.
It could step in to magnify Sister Margaret’s labors. It could support nonprofit agencies and help the men to organize themselves, to run hiring sites across the Island. It could fight the crimes of wage theft and harassment. It could give the men soup. It could abandon reflexive hostility to day laborers as the equivalent of a pest-control problem.
It could act decently, without starting a huge fight over immigration policy.
“We can always pray for a miracle,” Sister Margaret said.