It has been two weeks now that Santiago Isidro and some 150 other day laborers have been defying the Lakewood City administration and continuing to seek work on one of the main streets in the center of the town.

According to Isidro, who came here from Peru, the local mayor told them that he would help them designate a spot where they could gather and seek jobs. However, six months later, they discovered that the place the mayor assigned them to had no walls and was situated nearly four miles from the center of the town.

“He told us that we had to move out there on October 16. But with no heat for the winter, we will not move,” said Isidro, who makes a living by painting houses.

The case of Isidro and other day laborers was one of those discussed yesterday at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, where several organizations advocating for the rights of immigrants analyzed the problems of discrimination against New Jersey day laborers.

“Many municipalities are trying to establish ordinances to move the immigrants without understanding that many of those ordinances end up being invalidated because of the state's anti-discrimination laws,” said Edward Barocas of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), referring as an example to the lawsuit against the ordinance “for the Mitigation of Immigration” approved in July in the town of Riverside.

Another issue that was discussed was housing discrimination, which has caused a stir in the town of Glen Ridge, where an attempt was made to prohibit persons not directly related within a family from living together. The case was thrown out when the ACLU proved that nuns living in a convent would be in violation of the same law.

In Morristown, the mayor’s office began imposing fines for overcrowding as a way to eliminate day laborers, but now the owners of Hispanic businesses allege that the rezoning of the business district discriminates against them for being Hispanic.

“Although the climate where these immigrants reside may not be hospitable to them, it is important that they know they have a right to live in these towns, and when something happens to them they can have recourse to pro-immigrant organizations,” concluded immigration lawyer Amy Gottlieb of the American Friends Service Committee.