No One Is Coming to Help the Undocumented Workers

I’m a New York City kid, with thick gold hoops and a nameplate necklace and bracelet, in three kinds of gold, handed down to me by my undocumented mother who made me practice Selena Quintanilla songs to compete in a Univision variety show when we lived in Brooklyn, then Queens.

Ethnic shit. Until my brother was born in Brooklyn Hospital — named after Derek Jeter, in a year the Yankees won the World Series, 1998, when I was 10 — we were all undocumented.

I grew up knowing undocumented men like my father as mostly taxi drivers or restaurant workers. Day laborers seemed like an almost mythical archetype, groups of brown men huddled at the crack of dawn outside hardware superstores. Historically, legislators and immigration advocates have parted the sea of the undocumented with a splintered staff — working brown men and women on one side and academically achieving young brown people on the other, one a parasitic blight, the other heroic dreamers. I was valedictorian in middle and high school, went on to Harvard, then to Yale, and periodically cut baby bangs which contrasted with my self-harming scars. I would have been a fucking good poster child if I had wanted to be.

When I started writing about immigration, right after the 2016 presidential election, I decided to start with day laborers. Day laborers weren’t real to me, and what I heard about them wasn’t good. The New York Times described their work as “idling on street corners.” That didn’t sit right with me.

So I went off to Staten Island, the whitest, most affluent, most Republican borough in the city to meet a group of day laborers. I came to know them intimately over the last three years while writing my book The Undocumented Americans, which came out last month. I had learned what their long days look like, and their longer nights, especially for the men who live alone because their families stayed back home, who rely on long hours to stave off the loneliness, and prayer and community involvement to stave off vice.

There are varied estimates of the number of day laborers in NYC, from just under 6,000 to more than 10,000. A 2006 survey of day laborers, who are mostly men, reports that 75% of respondents identified as undocumented, two-thirds supported their families with their work, 60% said day laboring was their first job in the U.S., and 85% were looking for more permanent jobs.

I learned some other things too. I learned they are pros at what they do, that they have very specific skills in construction that make them in-demand workers, that many of them have refined business acumen, sometimes business cards, that they negotiate and network, and they have nearly all experienced racist abuse and wage theft, no workplace protections, no regulations, no collective bargaining.

But I also learned there are these really wonderful places called “worker centers” all over the country — more than 63 at last count — which were established by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to formalize this very informal sector of day laboring. They provide restrooms, water, coffee, phone chargers, OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) safety training, know-your-rights training, and dispatchers. Dispatchers serve as bilingual intermediaries between workers and employers, cementing transactions and trying to prevent abuses.

The last time I saw these men was maybe a year ago, at a party to celebrate the community, and it was a time of joy and recognition of their dignity, celebration, and survival, even in the context of persecution by the Trump administration.

When I got back in touch with them recently, to hear how they are weathering Covid-19, everything was different.

Santiago, 28, is the day laborer coordinator for Nuestra Calle, the main worker center on Silver View Road in Staten Island. Before the pandemic hit, they had 40–50 workers come in daily. Now they limit it to seven men who can come inside to use the bathroom, wash their hands, or make themselves a coffee, for 10 minutes, then leave, on rotation, while maintaining social distance.

Until three weeks ago, there were 30–40 men on the corner. Now there are 10. They wear masks, scarves, or kerchiefs around their mouth. Most wear gloves.

They used to have organizing meetings every Tuesday; now they meet on Zoom. Although some of the workers have smartphones, they are likely very inexpensive ones, and have limited capabilities. For their last in-person meeting, leadership briefed the workers on the pandemic, safety measures, and plans moving forward, and now Santiago calls all the workers on the phone to see how they are doing.

Work has disappeared. We’re just coming out of winter, when construction work was slow to begin with, and the guys are frustrated because they don’t have the money to stock up on provisions while other people are hoarding. Prices of essentials like toilet paper and food have gone up. Because they’re undocumented, they aren’t able to apply for assistance.

I call up an old jornalero — day laborer — friend, Manuel. (Names are changed to protect the vulnerable.) He picks up the phone as he’s coming back from New Jersey, where he’s being paid $160 a day to do construction work on a store. He’s one of the lucky ones. He’s had work. Last week, he worked for four days on a nice house in Staten Island belonging to a doctor who went to Florida. Manuel says it was for vacation but based on what I’ve seen on the news, it’s likely he was fleeing the epicenter of the pandemic — New York City. He left behind five undocumented immigrants to remodel his house in Staten Island and left them with zero safety equipment.

He’s glad to have work, he knows it’s rare, but he watches the news, and he’s scared.

“I’m afraid. I have a wife. I have a small child. I tell my kids everything. They know what’s going on. We have family meetings, and they cry about me possibly getting sick, about possibly losing work.”

“They are safe indoors and they want their businesses afloat. We are going to keep their businesses afloat.”

But Manuel is smart, and he has been informed of his rights through his trainings at the worker center, led by the legendary Pedro Ituralde, a Chilean migrant who is something of a godfather among the day laborers in Staten Island and recently stepped down from leadership at Nuestra Calle. Manuel says he’s been talking to Pedro on Facebook, and with other jornalero friends.

“I am not happy with how the government is treating us,” Manuel says. “They make no mention of undocumented people or day laborers when they talk about economic impact or affected people. They give aid to people with social security numbers but I pay taxes too. I don’t have a social security number but I obtained an ITIN number, and we undocumented immigrants contribute to the economy. If I lose my job, at the end of the year, I pay a lot in taxes anyway because I get paid in cash. Why do they treat us this way? We are all human and we are all suffering in New York.”

He brings up the economy again, this time explaining that many middle- and upper-middle-class New Yorkers are able to work from home but are worried about businesses remaining afloat. “It’s the working class who are working, it’s the Black people, it’s the immigrants who are working. They are safe indoors and they want their businesses afloat. We are going to keep their businesses afloat,” he says. “Us.” And he’s fucking right. He, and many other day laborers were part of volunteer brigades, who did the cleanup after Hurricane Sandy. Many other day laborers and undocumented immigrants in general, men and women, cleaned up after 9/11, with little protective gear, and got severely sick afterward.

He tells me he is a volunteer soccer coach for about 60 kids and has been checking in on their families and has sad news to share. One kid’s family just suffered a tragedy. His mother was pregnant and had Covid-19 symptoms but the hospital didn’t want to treat her, even though she had a very high fever, because she was uninsured. Manuel thinks it’s because she was undocumented. By the time they decided to treat her, it was too late, and they had to do an emergency C-section to save the baby. The baby survived but the woman is still in a coma. He doesn’t know how the family will recover, but he knows of many undocumented people with Covid symptoms who have been turned away from hospitals. Still, he won’t give in to fear.

“I am the only one who leaves the house but I don’t let fear ruin me because I have to be strong. I can’t paralyze my family,” he says.

I talk to another friend of mine, Joaquin, who is 54 years old and who could have died in his life so many times, in the desert, atop mountains, eaten by bobcats, and is here now, in Staten Island, quarantining in his room alone. “Following the government’s orders,” he says.

He tells me he leaves his room only to go buy food or send money to family back in Mexico. He says he always wears a mask. I ask him where he got the mask.

“The OSHA classes teach us that when employers don’t give you safety equipment — and I know it is our right that the owners are supposed to give them to us — but just in case, we have to procure our safety equipment, so we all have some face masks.”

Where did you learn that, I ask him.

“At the worker center,” he says.

As a workaholic, he’s been lonely, and self-isolation has been hard, but yesterday he did a video call with his five brothers in Mexico and his elderly parents. Their first ever video call. His family is practicing social distancing in Mexico, too. Joaquin is an extremely upstanding guy and only drinks on special occasions. This was a special occasion. The brothers, thousands of miles apart, each in isolation, cracked open a beer.

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