Sensible Day-Labor Solution

From Costa Mesa to Glendale, local governments are trying to regulate the informal hiring sites that develop when day laborers congregate on busy street corners looking for work. So the experiment launched Friday in Los Angeles is not unique--only controversial.

Responding to Harbor City residents and business owners who complain that the crowds of unemployed men who gather at Pacific Coast Highway and Bella Porte Ave. pose a nuisance and potential danger to public safety, Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores persuaded her colleagues to spend $90,000 for a pilot program to bring the problem under control. The money will be spent to establish six or seven city-sanctioned sites where day laborers can go to look for work. The first such site was opened Friday in Harbor City, complete with coffee, doughnuts and a mariachi band. The city even sent buses to drive day laborers from the intersection where they normally gather to a nearby city park where they can register their skills for prospective employers.

It seems a reasonable solution to a local problem, except for one thing: most of the men likely to use the hiring site are probably in the United States illegally. And it is not legal for employers to hire them under the 1986 immigration reform act. In effect, the city is helping illegal aliens find work, argue critics--who include officials of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

While INS officials are less than pleased with this experiment, Regional Commissioner BenDavidian has said that immigration agents will not raid the city’s hiring sites, a wise move since that would undoubtedly have a chilling effect on the men who use them. In fact, INS officials might even take some encouragement from the fact that cities in Los Angeles and Orange Counties are pressed to deal with the proliferation of street-corner hiring sites. This may indicate that the 1986 immigration law is working--making it harder for illegal immigrants to find steady jobs and forcing more of them to seek informal day jobs.

If federal and local officials remain patient, they may find that eventually this problem solves itself as illegal immigrants either begin legalizing their status or return to their homelands because there is no work to be found here. In the meantime, cities must be free to deal with the side effects of the new immigration law as best they can--without trying to enforce it, which is a federal responsibility. Los Angeles and other cities must try to make the hiring site experiment work, and the INS should cooperate rather than interfere.