U.S. Forced to Release New “Embarrassing” Documents On Controversial Se Communities Program

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Judge to Hold Hearing Today as Government Tries to Withhold More Documents

New York – In the wake of protests and civil disobedience in Chicago yesterday and across the country criticizing the Obama administration’s Se Communities program, immigrant advocates called on the government to turn over remaining documents about the program sought in a Freedom of Information lawsuit and to halt the controversial program.
A batch of unredacted documents released by court order this week, which federal district court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin called “embarrassing,” included acknowledgement by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attorneys that they would have to “rewrite” memos on whether the program is mandatory for states and localities and revealed schisms between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on the right of states and localities to opt out of the program. In her order, Judge Scheindlin chided the agencies for going “out of their way to mislead the public about Se Communities,” and pointedly stated that the “purpose of the [Freedom of Information Act] is to shed light on the operation of government, not shield it from embarrassment.”
The judge has not yet ruled on whether the government must release other documents relating to the legal authority to make Se Communities mandatory. Strikingly, the government continues to attempt to withhold documents that shed light on that policy. ICE will be back in court today arguing it should be able to keep secret documents relating to the agency’s purported legal basis to impose S-Comm on unwilling states like Massachusetts, Illinois and New York.
The documents are being sought in a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law with the law firm of Mayer Brown LLP on behalf of the National Day Laborer Organization Network.
One previously redacted email chain of over 100 pages shows the director of Se Communities, David Venturella, dodging questions from Margo Schlanger, an important official from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (OCRCL). When ordering release of this document, Judge Scheindlin observed that the exchange showed “clearly obfuscating” and “non-responsive” answers from ICE in response to a request for clarification from OCRCL about Se Communities policy. DHS000196-000317.
Another email chain from July 2010 discussing a draft response to Representative Zoe Lofgren’s letter requesting clarification on the agency’s opt-out policy indicates that the FBI was considering an opt-out option. The FBI had concerns that if no opt-out was allowed, states might consider not sending fingerprints to the FBI for other purposes. The email notes that “moving away from the mandatory stance” would require “S1” (Secretary Napolitano) and AG approval. ICE FOIA 10-2674.0002039.
The back-and-forth and deception was clearly frustrating to ICE officials. In an angry email dated August 6, 2010, a Se Communities employee comments: “We never address whether or not it is mandatory – the answer is written to sound like it is but doesn’t state it. It’s very convoluted – or is that the point? I’m all about shades of grey but this really is a black and white question…Is it mandatory? Yes or No. Ok, so not such an easy question to answer.” ICE FOIA 10-2674.0011165-ICE FOIA 10-2674.11171.
Commenting on the documents, Sunita Patel, staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights said, “The previously redacted portions of these documents—now public for the first time—reveal the extent of ICE’s deceit and political game-playing in its communications with states and localities. Perhaps more disconcerting, though, is the confusion and flip-flopping within the agency about their own policies and plans for deployment of such a high-impact and unprecedented program.”
Added Bridget Kessler, an attorney with the Cardozo Immigration Justice Clinic, “These newly unredacted documents signal that the fight is not over yet. ICE’s purportedly ‘mandatory’ S-Comm policy appears to lack a sound legal basis, and is certainly misguided and confused as a matter of policy. Massachusetts, New York and Illinois should continue to push the federal government to honor their rejection of S-Comm.”
Sarahi Uribe, national organizer for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said, “Even as they moved full-speed-ahead with deploying this program across the nation, at times top-level agency officials didn’t seem to fully understand—or disagreed about—how the program would work. Everywhere around the country people are resisting—there have been walkouts and arrests during S-Comm hearings, rallies, and thousands of petition signatures delivered to President Obama. The time has come. It’s time to halt S-Comm.”
The groups said they will continue to litigate this case to obtain the full information about S-Comm that the public is entitled to.
Visit CCR’s NDLON v. ICE case page or the joint website, UncovertheTruth.org, for an index of the newly released documents, the text of the FOIA request, the lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York and all other relevant documents.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change. Visit www.ccrjustice.org.
The mission of the National Day Laborer Organization Network is to improve the lives of day laborers in the U.S. by unifying and strengthening its member organizations to be more strategic and effective in their efforts to develop leadership, mobilize day laborers in order to protect and expand their civil, labor and human rights. Visit www.ndlon.org.
The Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law was founded in 2008 to provide quality pro bono legal representation to indigent immigrants facing deportation. Under the supervision of experienced practitioners, law students in the Clinic represent individuals facing deportation and community-based organizations in public advocacy, media and litigation projects. Visit www.cardozo.yu.edu.

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Closing of Palm Beach County day-labor center leaves workers back on the streets

Closing of Palm Beach County day-labor center leaves workers back on the streets

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Closing of Palm Beach County day-labor center leaves workers back on the streets

Day laborers gather outside Caribbean Plants on Okeechobee Boulevard and F Road Wednesday morning. Buena Fe, one of only two day-labor centers in Palm Beach County, closed last month.

Mitra Malek, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer | Source: PalmBeachPost.com

LOXAHATCHEE GROVES — Workers are back at street corners along Okeechobee Boulevard, hoping to trade manual toil for money.

Buena Fe, one of only two day-labor centers in Palm Beach County, closed last month.

The slow economy forced the hand of the church that ran the center, said the Rev. Calvin Lyerla of Acts II Worship Center.

“We just could no longer justify the expense,” Lyerla said.

The 500-member Pentecostal congregation footed the entire $50,000 annual budget to run Buena Fe, which opened in March 2008. The center couldn’t find partners, and county agencies rejected the half-dozen or so grants it sought, Lyerla said.

“They were providing a great service to the town,” Mayor Dave Browning said.

Only 15 to 20 workers came to Buena Fe daily this year, about half the number compared with early days. And only 8 to 10 employers used the center daily for the same period. The center registered a total of 1,065 workers and 87 employers.

For a while, Buena Fe boomed. Plenty of migrant workers, most from Mexico and Guatemala, biked to the double-wide trailer on Okeechobee Boulevard. That kept drivers and workers safe; Okeechobee Boulevard is a quick-moving thoroughfare that doesn’t lend itself to the stop-and-go traffic of employers scouting for laborers.

Now the town is left with its original problem.

“It’s not quite as bad because there’s less work,” Browning said. “At the same time, everybody who doesn’t have a job is out there looking for work. There are eight to 10 guys at the stops. It becomes a safety issue.”

The town council in 2008 approved an ordinance banning workers from hawking manual skills on local street corners. But the law has no traction unless they have some other place to meet.

“Legally, I don’t know that we can prevent people from meeting on the road, even though it’s dangerous,” Browning said.

Loxahatchee Groves Landowners Association President Marge Herzog also is concerned about whether children waiting at bus stops near the corners in pre-dawn hours will be comfortable with a group of men nearby.

“It has been an issue for the young girls, the catcalling, the ‘hey girlie,’” said Herzog, who was vice mayor when opened.

Meanwhile, Caribbean Plants at F Road and Okeechobee Boulevard, has agreed to let workers gather there, which could help, Lyerla said.

Buena Fe’s shuttering follows that of the Lake Worth Resource Center, which closed in December after two years. El Sol in Jupiter is still open, launching in September 2006.

Authoritative National Report Condemns Se Communities Program

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Today, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and others made public an authoritative report condemning the Se Communities deportation program and recommending its termination.
The report includes testimony from former District Attorney of New York Robert Morgenthau, heads of law enforcement, and victims of Se Communities like Isaura in Los Angeles whose 911 call for help resulted in her deportation proceedings.
In contrast to the DHS appointed taskforce which has failed to enlist the voices of affected communities, scholars, or critics on the subject, this report constitutes a real deliberative and representative review of the program.
The report recommends that the Se Communities be terminated, that the current OIG investigation of S-Comm be expanded to all ICE Access programs, that the Department of Justice begin its own investigation into the mysterious role of the FBI in Se Communities, and that states not be compelled to share biometric data with ICE.
The following statement can be attributed to the National Community Advisory Commission
“This report confirms what immigrant communities have long known. The program called Se Communities results in the opposite. Entangling local police in immigration enforcement is not just bad policy as the experts testify. Conscripting local police into immigration enforcement has provoked a massive civil rights crisis our country now faces. The only suitable approach is to end Se Communities.”
The Commission includes: American Friends Service Committee, Project Voice New England, Asian Law Caucus, CASA de Maryland, Center for Constitutional Rights, CENTRO de Igualdad y Derechos, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, Detention Watch Network, Grassroots Leadership, Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, Immigrant Legal Resource Center, National Day Laborer Organizing Network, National Immigrant Justice Center, National Immigration Law Center, National Immigration Project of the National Lawyer’s Guild, Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, Rights Working Group, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, We-Count!
The report is available at http://altopolimigra.com/s-comm-shadow-report/
Background on the Se Communities Program is available at www.uncoverthetruth.org and in a press brief at http://ndlon.org/pdf/scommbrief.pdf…

Day Laborers Line Up Overnight For Jobs

Day Laborers Line Up Overnight For Jobs

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By Kelly Bartnick | Published: August 5, medical 2011 | Source: Keloland.com

Day Laborers Line Up Overnight For Jobs

The walk to work begins well before sunrise for some Sioux Falls laborers. They line up four hours early just to get a chance at a 12-hour shift.

SIOUX FALLS, SD – The walk to work begins well before sunrise for some Sioux Falls laborers. They line up four hours early just to get a chance at a 12-hour shift.

When permanent job leads dry up, day labor is often the only way to make ends meet. But finding the work can mean being competitive and getting in line long before many others are even awake.

For five men in the early morning hours, 26th Street and Cliff Avenue is the most uncertain corner in Sioux Falls.

“The sooner you get here the better your chances are of getting out,” day laborer Dave Beers said.

If you can even get out at all. Dave Beers has been lining up outside Labor Ready every morning for years now, just for a chance at a paycheck.

“It could vary and it depends on the weather too. If it rains, most of the outdoor jobs could be cancelled,” Beers said.

But Beers is lucky; he’s on a repeat list at a packaging company that usually takes up to 13 people each day.

“They start at six, so we have to leave at 4:30, a quarter to five because we gotta be out there before 6 a.m. and it’s a 12-hour shift,” Beers said.

“I generally leave my place at 2 a.m. And I walk down here. It’s about a 30-35 minute walk,” day laborer Rodney Doscher said.

That’s why Rodeney Doscher is first in line. He hopes to get set with Beers Friday morning.

“Not knowing if you’re going to get out is only tough if you’re counting on getting out in that particular day because you might need to get money to get rent covered,” Doscher said.

And that’s something all these workers worry about every day. But they say, lately the work has been steady, even though they can’t get a permanent job.

“I have applications out all over town. You can’t get no calls back. So, the only way I can pay bills is come up here and work,” Beers said.

And compete just for that chance.

“I’ve seen as few as 10 and as many as 40-50 people,” Doscher said.

Workers say opportunities are better during the summer than they are when the snow flies. Since many summer jobs are outside, there’s also competition to be indoors out of the elements, which is another reason why they line up so early.

ICE Announcement throws discredited deportation program into further disarray and confusion.

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DHS Cannot Rule by Decree
In a shocking announcement by ICE late Friday afternoon announcement where the agency announced its attempt to unilaterally nullify years of contracts and agreements with 39 state partners. The agency will inform state officials that participation in the controversial Se Communities program which is currently under investigation by the Office of the Inspector General and which is the subject of intense criticism, is mandatory.
Chris Newman, Legal Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network issued this statement:
“Today’s announcement confirms ICE’s status as a rogue agency. The level of deception involved in S-Comm so far has been alarming , but this moves things to another level. A contract is a contract—but apparently not when it comes to ICE.
A federal judge already found that DHS and ICE went out of their way to mislead the public about Se Communities. Today’s announcement shows that ICE also systematically misled the states, engaging in protracted negotiations–at substantial cost to the American public–for what it now claims are sham contracts.
All the deception in the world can’t hide the fact that the S-Comm is horrible policy. By entangling local police in immigration enforcement, S-Comm is criminalizing immigrants and leading to the Arizonification of the country. Ultimately, the announcement today only puts into further question the legal basis for the program. ICE can no longer be trusted to police itself.”
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Se Communities Courtroom Battle Comes to a Head

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New York, NY.
What: Courtroom Arguments in NDLON v. ICE FOIA litigation
Where: Manhattan, Federal District Court.
When: August 11th.
Next Thursday, August 11th, advocates will argue for the release of key documents the agency continues to withhold related to the Se Communities opt-out policies. Upon reviewing certain of the unredacted documents that are the subject of this challenge, Federal District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin concluded in a scathing opinion, “There is ample evidence that ICE and DHS have gone out of their way to mislead the public about Se Communities,” and ordered the agency to release certain documents that could not be withheld simply because they might embarrass DHS and ICE.

In the year and a half since the beginning of the FOIA litigation, the documents that have been released so far shed light on a secretive and over-reaching deportation program. As the dangerous scope and impact of the program has been uncovered, a consensus has grown calling for the program’s termination. Governors in Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts have sought to opt-out of the program.

In an attempt to preempt the embarrassing documents that the court has ordered released and the conclusive results of the OIG investigation to be completed this winter, ICE and DHS have rolled out a series of cosmetic tweaks and a taskforce to “study” the program. These announcements have been widely condemned as insufficient given the civil rights crisis created by the program.

“If what we’ve seen so far tells us anything, it’s that ICE is an agency that cannot be trusted. The court has ordered ICE to release documents that FOIA gives the public a right to access. But the agency continues to stonewall and delay turning them over. The constantly shifting policies and lack of transparency about those policies, truly make it difficult to take what ICE says at face value. ” explained, Bridget Kessler, lawyer for Benjamin Cardozo School of Law.
Chris Newman of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network added,”DHS has far more interest in the politics of SCOMM than it does in developing a lawful policy that actually serves local communities. While DHS has moved at breakneck speed to advance a dubious program with media spin, it’s strategy in this litigation has been characterized by one word: delay. Thankfully, federal courts- and not DHS- will have the last word and will ultimately compel disclosure of information owed to the public and required by federal law.”…

Home Health Workers Are Sick of Being Shut Out of Labor Law

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By Michelle Chen, Colorlines and In These Times | August 3, 2011 | Source: Huffington Post

As walking canes replace running shoes, and the parents who raised us start needing to be cared for themselves, the first dawn of America’s aging boom approaches. But even as the “gray wave” looms on the horizon, the way we treat the workers who care for our elders lags generations behind.

Hundreds of thousands of home care workers remain excluded from the country’s key labor laws. As with many other groups of “excluded workers,” like farm and day laborers, inequities in the law hit immigrants and people of color the hardest. And the stakes are higher in home care industry, in which demand for, and the cost of care, reach unprecedented levels. More people have been moving toward home- and community-based services for the elderly and people with disabilities, as alternative to institutionalization. Evidence indicates caring for people at home is in many cases more cost-effective than conventional nursing homes.

Yet for all the help they provide, home care workers feel a bit neglected these days. Through an arcane provision in federal labor law, Washington has essentially shut home-based health workers from minimum-wage and overtime rules. That means home health aides may be even worse off than regular domestic workers, who are at least technically entitled to federal minimum wage. The Department of Labor has since the 1970s manipulated an exemption for “companion” workers “into a whole exclusion” of some 1.7 million skilled workers, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project:

The result has been to suppress wages for the home care workforce, consigning millions of caregivers — the overwhelming majority of them women, many of them immigrants and women of color — to working poverty. The lack of ordinary overtime coverage has also facilitated excessive hours in small segments of the industry. Long hours are not only grueling for workers but can contribute to worse care for patients, as caregivers working 60 hours or more a week face fatigue and stress in performing what is a demanding job under any circumstances. These substandard working conditions have created very serious employee recruitment and retention problems, generating labor shortages that prevent us from meeting the nation’s rapidly growing need for home care.

The NELP has called on the Department of Labor to revise its regulations to include home care workers under federal wage-and-hour protections. Absent federal protection, only 21 states and the District of Columbia currently provide minimum wage or overtime. Still, the NELP points to those local examples as proof that federal coverage of home care workers is feasible.

The need for regulation has increased as the home health industry assumes a more prominent role in the healthcare system. Medicaid funds support many of the agencies that employ the majority of this workforce. And with the home-health aide workforce expected to surge by about 50 percent from 2008-2018, NELP notes that government oversight has tightened as the sector has boomed, and some states have set up public authorities to administer home care services.

Nonetheless, the workforce is asked to do a lot for very little. Workers carry out not just regular companionship duties but also paramedical services like monitoring vital signs and administering medication. Yet a typical aide can work full-time and still not make enough to live on; the 2009 median hourly wage was just $9.34.

Meanwhile, funding shortfalls and budget theatrics in Washington are driving both parties to attack healthcare for the poor and aging. The latest Republican budget proposal would gut Medicaid through some $100 billion in “savings” over the next decade (directly countering promised expansion of Medicaid under health care reform), plus additional cutbacks in Medicare, which of course provides basic medical coverage for seniors. And adding insult to injury, the budget axe is hovering over their social security checks, too.

Earlier this month, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which has campaigned for the rights of home-based labor across the country, brought the voices of home-based workers to Washington at the Caring Across Generations conference. Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the Alliance, emphasized the connection between quality care and decent work:

Caring for the aging and people with disabilities is one of our most important responsibilities as a nation. That means protecting the vital services we have — Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security — and creating the quality care jobs, training, and family support that we need.

We live in a political climate that constantly devalues critical service sector work, from teaching our kids to keeping the streets clean. Our elders are growing older in the same hostile climate. So we ought to ask ourselves what society collectively owes to the workers with whom we entrust the health and comfort of loved ones. Your grandmother’s home caregiver, who may be just like a family member to her, has a family of her own to take care of when she goes home at night.

Daily News Editorial: Budget bust — The price of neglecting pension reform can be seen in cuts to our schools, to the elderly, even to day laborers

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Source: DailyNews.com | July 31, 2011

Day laborers crowding the entrance to Home Depot. Seniors dumped out of day care programs. Students shut out of public higher education because of cost. This is what ignoring pension reform looks like. Until now, the effects of many of the budget cuts by state, mind county and city governments have been visible only around the edges of society. The average person could ignore them. They hit home at someone else’s house.

But now the effects are showing up in everyday life.

They are the theme that links a handful of news stories this month.

The closures of day-labor centers that had been funded by Los Angeles-area cities took away such services as health services, English lessons and protection from exploitive employers. It also sent manual laborers back to Home Depot stores and other unofficial gathering spots to look for work, often to the annoyance of pers.

The discontinuation of state funding for California’s 300 adult day health care centers, including dozens in the San Fernando Valley, raised fears that ailing and isolated senior citizens would be denied medical attention and the company of other people. The responsibility for helping them will fall to other cash-strapped agencies and to seniors’ families.

Cuts in state funding for public education prompted tuition increases of 12 percent for the California State University system and 9.6 percent for the University of California system just weeks before the start of the 2011-12 academic year. That’s a terrible blow for many students and families, for whom money may be scarce anyway these days.

Unfortunately, we’d better get used to such tangible symptoms of government budget crunches.

It is easy but only slightly correct for elected officials to put all of this down to the economic downturn. Leaders themselves deserve blame for signing off on unsustainable benefits for public employees and delaying hard choices.

The day was bound to come when the growing pension obligations would balloon – much like the mortgages that force thousands to walk away from their homes.

City leaders talk about huge revenue gaps. The trouble is not the incoming money, which has stayed roughly the same or grown. The trouble is the cost of servicing the debt and obligations incurred by generations of politicians who traded employee benefits for support and re-election.

Recently, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council scored a small victory on this count by extracting concessions on health-benefits payments from the city’s police force. Of course, to achieve that, the city had to give the police pay raises of 7 percent over three years, handing off a budget headache to another mayor and council.

As one of the largest drains on public funds in the state, pensions and other retirement benefits are siphoning off billions of dollars right off the top of any budget. The downturn in the market only increased the liability. It didn’t create the problem.

Politicians know that most of the electorate finds the issue of pension reform to be vague, esoteric and inaccessible. They know they can take the easy way now because they will no longer be in office – at least, not their current office – when the chickens come home to roost.

Voters have let politicians get away with this, and now, all around us, we see the results of this failure embodied by laborers going back to the Home Depot, seniors being displaced, students leaving college. Chickens roosting.

Dept of Justice Sues Alabama, Needs to do so in every state

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BIRMINGHAM, AL – The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) today filed a federal challenge to Alabama’s draconian anti-immigrant law. Modeled on Arizona’s infamous SB 1070 but taking it to even greater extremes, the Alabama law is considered the most pernicious anti-immigrant state law to date.
The DOJ lawsuit follows on the heels of HICA v. Bentley, a class-action challenge asserting that the law is unconstitutional on multiple grounds, filed on July 8 by the National Immigration Law Center and a coalition of civil rights organizations. On July 21, the coalition filed a request that the court block the law from taking effect, pending a final ruling on the law’s constitutionality. The hearing to determine whether the court should enjoin the law has been set for August 24, 2011 in the civil rights coalition case.
The following statements can be attributed to various members of the coalition:
Pablo Alvarado, director, National Day Laborer Organizing Network:
“The suit filed by the DOJ is an acknowledgement of the civil rights crisis caused by the Arizonification of our country and deepened in states like Alabama and Georgia where they have built upon Arizona’s laws. We welcome the administration’s action but see it as treating the symptom rather than the . More easily than court proceedings, President Obama could bring relief to our communities with the stroke of a pen.”
Linton Joaquin, general counsel, National Immigration Law Center:

“Today, the federal government rightly asserted that states cannot lawfully ignore the U.S. Constitution and enact their own sweeping immigration laws. Alabama’s law – like its ideological predecessors in Arizona, Utah, Indiana, and Georgia – is an affront to our American and constitutional values. We welcome the federal government’s challenge, and we look forward to continuing our own legal battle to permanently remove this law from Alabama’s lawbooks.”
Sam Brooke, attorney, Southern Poverty Law Center:
“It has been clear from the start that this law is blatantly overreaching and seriously flawed. We welcome the federal government’s involvement in preventing this dangerous and costly law from going into effect.”
Cecilia Wang, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project:
“We applaud the government for taking action to stop Alabama’s anti-immigrant law. Today’s lawsuit will help protect the civil rights of Alabamians against legislation that mandates unlawful police searches and seizures in the name of immigration enforcement.”
Olivia Turner, executive director, ACLU of Alabama:
“We welcome the federal government’s effort to block Alabama’s unconstitutional HB 56. We hope this law will be enjoined, just like the law in Arizona that inspired it.”
Erin Oshiro, senior staff attorney, Asian American Justice Center, a member of the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice:
“It is encouraging that the Department of Justice decided to challenge Alabama’s anti-immigrant bill. This move sends a strong signal to Alabama and other states that the federal government takes its immigration authority seriously and serves as a warning to states considering these types of unconstitutional laws.”
Victor Viramontes, Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund National Senior Counsel
“It is appropriate that the Department of Justice has sued to block Alabama’s illegal and discriminatory law that unfairly targets Latinos.”
Attorneys on the case include Brooke , Mary Bauer , Andrew Turner, Michelle Lapointe, Dan Werner, and Naomi Tsu of the Southern Poverty Law Center; Cecillia D. Wang, Katherine Desormeau, Kenneth J. Sugarman, Andre Segura, Elora Mukherjee, Omar C. Jadwat, Lee Gelernt, Michael K. T. Tan of the American Civil Liberties Union and Freddy Rubio of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama; Joaquin, Karen C. Tumlin, Tanya Broder, Shiu-Ming Cheer, Melissa S. Keaney, and Vivek Mittal of the National Immigration Law Center; Sin Yen Ling of the Asian Law Caucus; Oshiro of the Asian American Justice Center; Foster Maer, Ghita Schwarz and Diana Sen of Latino Justice; Thomas Saenz, Nina Perales, Viramontes, Amy Pederson, and Martha Gomez of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund; Jessica Karp of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network; G. Brian Spears, Ben Bruner, Herman Watson, Jr., Eric J. Artrip and Rebekah Keith McKinney. …

Local day laborers: Older, undocumented, undereducated

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July 28, s 2011 | 11:53am | Source: L.A. Now, LATimesBlogs.LATimes.com

The average day laborer in Harbor City and Wilmington is 44 years old and has lived in the United States for nearly 17 years, according to survey results out of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

The Harbor-UCLA Summer Urban Health Fellowship conducted research and health outreach with the assistance of seven volunteer s,  nine medical students, 13 college students and 20 local high schoolers.

Their project’s findings were based on interviews with 158 day laborers in Harbor City and Wilmington.

The profile of these local workers differs from a national sample of day laborers based on research from 2004. That earlier study found day laborers had an average age of 34 and had been in the country an average of six years.

The local surveys found that 75% of the workers are not legal United States residents — not surprising given the informal nature of day work and the difficulty of finding regular jobs without U.S. citizenship.

Other findings included:

– More than half the day laborers found work less than 10 days per month; more than a fourth, less than five days
– A third reported performing work they consider dangerous within the last month
– Two-thirds reported doing work for which they were not paid within the last month.
– Two-thirds reported their own health as fair or poor
– More than 30% said they’d been “harassed by police” within the last month
– 75% had not completed high school; two-thirds had not completed eighth grade

All but one of the day laborers surveyed were men.

Interviewers also asked why the laborers came to the United State and recorded their top four responses: 1) to find a better life; 2) to find employment; 3) to provide for families and children; 4) because they believed there would be more opportunities in the U.S.

“They are not coming here to use social services but because they want to work,” said
Chardonnay Vance, a participating medical student from Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Research guidelines did not allow the high school students to conduct the research, but they participated in other aspects of the program, including organizing community health fairs in the Wilmington area, which is underserved by healthcare providers.

About half the participating students came from Banning and Carson high schools. One high school alum of the program has returned as a volunteer . The program is managed by two Harbor-UCLA s, Gilberto Granados and Jyoti Puvvula, who donate their time.

Virgilio Goze, 18, who just graduated from Banning High, volunteered each of the last four years in the summer outreach program, which is funded by donations from local politicians, medical centers and foundations.

“It pretty much gave me a wider world view,” said Virgilio, whose own parents have sometimes struggled economically since immigrating from the Philippines.

He’ll be attending UCLA as a premed biology major. He wants to be a family : “The general interacts with families. They are the first line. They actually talk to the patient. Those things really touched me.”

Another participant, Erik Ruiz, 16, will be entering the 10th grade at Banning High. He’s grown up with a severely disabled brother.

“I always wanted to know: Why would this happen to anyone?” he said. “I looked to the medical field for finding that question out.”

He plans on becoming the first in his family to graduate from a four-year college in his quest to become a : “I love helping people. Giving everybody a smile makes me happy.”