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Newsday Editorial: Closing Huntington Day Laborer Site Won’t Fix Town’s Problems

Posted May 13, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Suffolk

Last week, I reported on the closing of a day laborer site in Huntington Station, which residents had incorrectly blamed for problems with violence and loitering. Earlier this week, I posted some additional background about the decision from Family Service League, the group that administers the site.

Today’s Newsday features an editorial from Sandra Dunn, an immigration program officer at the Hagedorn Foundation, which partially funded the facility. Dunn blasts town officials for unfairly blaming the site for problems raised by residents, and for their shortsightedness.

From the editorial:

Closing the site will not help ease tensions or create a safer community. It will mean more men looking for work on the street, more men without toilet facilities, fewer men learning about citizenship requirements and taxpayer identification numbers, and, therefore, fewer on the path toward integration. The community and the town board appear to want to sweep day laborers out of Huntington Station, not understanding that the users of the site are Huntington Station residents. They have a constitutional right to gather in public places, as numerous court rulings around the country have established.

But closing the site allows the town to say “we did something” in response to the community’s concerns about crime. Unfortunately these will be empty words, because the town is punishing the wrong population. Gang violence may be flourishing in some sections of Huntington Station, but not at the hiring site, where working men simply seek a day’s pay for a day’s work to sustain and improve life for their families.

Closing the site also sends a strong message to many in the Latino and immigrant communities - not just day laborers - that the town does not welcome them or value integration enough to provide them with information about citizenship and income tax payments, and does not care enough about their well-being and quality of life to continue offering the basic shelter that the trailer provides.

We cannot imagine what public good is served by closing this successful hiring site, which has cost the Town of Huntington less and less over the years. In fact, the Family Service League reports that now that the community knows the site will be closed, local residents are hiring laborers there in record numbers. We hope these same citizens will call on the town to reverse its shortsighted decision.

For the complete op-ed, click here.

Tags : day laborer, family service league, hagedorn, huntington, huntington station

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