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The Farmingville Crucible I: Guest Blog

Posted February 19, 2008 by Patrick Young, Esq.
Categories: Hate Watch

Jim Claffey has studied and documented the wellspring of the immigration conflict in Suffolk County for nearly a decade. He currently works for the Long Island Community Foundation. He is the author of this essay on the sources of anti-immigrant violence in Suffolk. [Pat Young]

Prologue
In 1998, the sleepy town of Farmingville suddenly captured the front page of Newsday. Police from the town of Brookhaven, to which the hamlet of Farmingville belongs, raided two homes and evicted a total of forty day laborers on the charge of overcrowded housing. Without other recourse, the men turned to the Catholic parish, which welcomed and housed them overnight. Thus began a tangled and painful series of events still playing out as of this writing. The nadir, however, was attempted murder.

Why Farmingville?
In the late 1990s a number of Mexican immigrants arrived from the state of Hidalgo, west of Mexico City, during a construction boom on eastern Long Island. Farmingville, home to fifteen thousand inhabitants, is a blue-collar residential area seventy miles east of Manhattan and strategically located just off the Long Island Expressway, the principal highway that cuts east-west through the center of the island. Word spread, from friend to relative to friend, that there were employment opportunities. The numbers grew as the men, who came without their families, arrived to take on jobs in roofing, construction, lawn care, fence work, cement, and masonry. They came for one reason: to better care for their families back home, since jobs there were scarce and low paying. They were mostly rural folks, although eventually others came from Mexico City and a handful from other Latin American countries.

Then and Now
Daily, the men stand on two corners, both near 7-Eleven convenience stores, and wait or shape up for employers (contractors, landscapers, homeowners) to pass seeking workers. Shape up has become the term used nationally to describe this pattern of waiting for work on corners. In spite of limited English, workers have learned to bargain for their pay. Numbers vary greatly from place to place; in Farmingville, in spring and summer, there could be eighty men on one corner and forty on another. Most of the actual work does not take place in Farmingville itself; the town has become, however, the pick-up place for workers all over surrounding areas. The number of men on the two corners, therefore, is striking to someone new to the area. In fact, it became more than striking to the residents themselves.

The Civic Association
Following the eviction incident and newspaper coverage of outreach by the parish to the dislodged workers, meetings at the Farmingville Civic Association, a nonpartisan community organization concerned with town issues, became well attended and raucous. These meetings were characterized by many times more heat than light, as a small minority dominated the sessions with calls for the authorities to remove the workers. This group also criticized the church for aiding and abetting the illegals and promoted inflammatory rhetoric about the loss of quality of life. Opposing voices, attempting to speak humanely about the workers, were immediately silenced.

From this grew the Sachem Quality of Life Organization (SQL), a strident, well-organized but small constituency that pretended to speak for the whole of Farmingville. Composed of thirty to forty working-class, native-born residents, this group began a media blitz demanding that public officials at the local and federal levels act immediately. They also spoke to immigration officials (the then INS) and began a generalized campaign to rid the town of the undocumented. The effort included harassment and verbal abuse of workers and contractors at the pick-up sites, photographing license plates of contractors and others hiring the workers, filming worker pick-ups, and physical interference with the hiring process itself. The goals were to interfere with the hiring process by intimidating the contractors and to amass visual material for presentation to immigration authorities to support their claims of an unlawful disaster on the streets of their town. At the same time, and not unrelated to the above, incidents of more serious harassment multiplied: rock and bottle throwing at workers on the street, BB guns fired at workers, windows broken at their homes, laborers accosted on the street. Tensions were rising at an alarming rate.

Part II From Resistance to Violence

Tags : hate crimes, hate watch, sachem quality of life, steve levy

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