Another Local (Immigration) Issue: The Regulation of Day Laborers

As news of the Hazleton case sinks, recall that similart ordinances are being challenged across the country.  Cities also are involved in related controversies as well, from regulating taco trucks to the use of the English language.  Along these lines, day laborers who gather on public streets (or at places like Home Depot) have become the oft-maligned public face of illegal immigration, even though they represent only 3 percent of all the estimated male undocumented workers in California, according to a study released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California.  Efforts to regulate day laborers seeking work have run into trouble in the courts, including in Redondo Beach (here) and Baldwin Park, California (here).

On any given day in the Golden State, about 40,000 people are employed or looking for work as day laborers, a number so small that it doesn’t represent even half of 1 percent of California’s entire working population, the study by the San Francisco-based think tank found. Despite their small numbers, day laborers’ visibility often makes them the focus of media coverage, and the object of community activists’ attempts to try to crack down on illegal immigration, said economist Arturo Gonzalez, whose report, “Day Labor in the Golden State” (here), is based on data gathered in a 2004 national survey of day workers.

For an interesting story by Susan Ferriss on day laborers, click here. Abel Valenzuela at UCLA (here) has written some cutting edge scholarship on day laborers.