While last week the city’s official unemployment rate reached a troubling 8.1 percent, indicators suggest that the population without working papers is faring even worse. The desperation can be particularly felt at day laborer sites in Woodside, Queens where Garcia stands with dozens of others competing for low-skilled jobs in construction, carpentry, moving and cleaning. They used to get picked up for day jobs – but now they just keep waiting. The lack of work has led some to become homeless.
These workers are some of the estimated 7.2 million undocumented immigrants who have been employed in the American economy, making up about 5 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Despite the official status of their presence and employment as illegal and unwanted, their engagement in the labor force tells a different story – as does their estimated $7 billion contribution to Social Security through payroll taxes, according to the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank in Washington, which says "we have at the very least implicitly invited these individuals in." In New York City, the New York Immigration Coalition estimates a workforce of more than 10,000 day laborers, the majority of whom are undocumented.
Garcia, who emigrated from Mexico several years ago, spends six days a week under the elevated tracks of the 7 train waiting for work. Groupings of South Asians, East Asians and other Latino immigrants also wait for employers to pick them up in vans or trucks for a day’s work. Despite Garcia’s perseverance through a cold winter, he hasn’t been very successful. He has only found work one day in the past month.
“The majority are in this situation,” says Roberto Meneses, President of Jornaleros Unidos de Woodside – United Day Laborers of Woodside – a group that organizes and educates workers around the area. Meneses, also from Mexico, has worked as a day laborer for more than five years. “Before, I would find work a minimum of three days a week," he said. "This past month, I worked three days.”
Meneses and Garcia, like most day laborers, typically work in the construction industry. But since the housing crisis started, new building projects in the city have slowed considerably. Managers of buildings are also less likely to do repairs and renovations. One Woodside property owner, a frequent visitor to a day laborer site on Roosevelt Avenue, hires the workers to maintain his home and three rental units. But lately he's coming by less often. “I’m not fixing certain things," he told City Limits, after a swing by to find an electrician.
~
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, construction unemployment nationwide has nearly doubled in the past year to 22.8 percent. That particularly impacts unauthorized immigrants – while they account for 5 percent of the total labor force, they make up 12 percent of those working in construction, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.
