Most day laborers are Latinos. They can be found in many places, exposed to the elements, waiting to be contracted almost always for short-term jobs. In New York, day laborers gather on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens or on North Ocean Avenue in Suffolk Country. In New Jersey, they can be found on Paterson's Main Avenue or Columbus Avenue in Palisades Park. In fact, day laborers can be found in many other places, visible to those who require their services.

They do not congregate to commit criminal acts; in fact, they work so that they can send weekly remittances back to their families or to support them if the families are here. This is all that interests them, no matter if it means breaking their backs, roughing up their hands, or working themselves to the point of exhaustion.

Their wages, earned honestly, are all that drives them. We could say that their motto is the old adage, “If you work off the books, live a life by the book.” And, they are not the major causes of scandals or accidents, as people mistakenly thought in Suffolk County, Long Island.

Suffolk legislators Joe Carapacca and Jack Eddington thought they could show that the day laborers, who gathered on the county's avenues, were the cause of the rise in traffic accidents reported there. With this coup in hand, they thought they could push through Resolution 1022, which would mandate a $550 fine and the ominous blot of a minor criminal record for anyone found waiting for work on the streets.

This initiative failed to prosper because last Tuesday, “it was demonstrated that those accidents occurred at night, and not in the mornings, when the laborers come out to look for work. The bill was defeated by a vote of 10 to 6,” said Carlos Canales of the Suffolk Workers' Rights Center.

Achieving this result was not easy. A broad coalition of immigrants and laborers' rights and defense organizations literally moved heaven and earth to present testimonials, proofs, and people willing to testify in favor of the laborers, and to telephone the legislators to alert them to the dangers posed by the measure.

The spirit of Resolution 1022, successfully defeated, is the same as that of the ordinance proposed in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, which sought to throw undocumented children out of the schools, evict them and their families from their homes, and penalize employers for hiring the undocumented, all usurpations of powers properly in the sphere of the federal government.

The problem is that, by all indications, initiatives of this kind will continue to be introduced, to blame immigrants for everything bad that happens in a locality.

It is worrisome that practical solutions for the presence of laborers on the streets, like the installation of contracting centers, still have not been put into practice in New York City, despite the fact that they have been announced twice by Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs Guillermo Linares. By way of contrast we must recall that the city of Passaic, New Jersey, governed by Puerto Rican mayor Samuel Rivera, has such a center up and running.

If we look at day laborers in relation to the construction industry, it must be said that in the frenzy of the “real estate boom” (renovation and construction of homes before mega-buildings became the engine of this growth) of the past decade, what is singularly notable is the presence of thousands or millions of day laborers who, through their work, contributed and continue to contribute to the creation of value in the industry.

In the midst of all this, there is a great truth. Laborers make up a work force whose work is not exportable, as distinct from jobs in the assembly and manufacturing sectors that have gone to China, or of those in computer programming or laboratory analysis that went to India.

Laborers are employed first and foremost in the construction industry, then in gardening or in farm areas as fruit and vegetable harvesters, whom the mechanization of agriculture has been unable to replace, or in cattle ranching. This is to say, that their work is like that of nurses, teachers or sales personnel – jobs tied to a place. Such jobs cannot be outsourced. They have the dignity of necessary work.

But day labor is temporary, with all the disadvantages and troubles that implies. That is why we should stand strong with them to assure that towns, counties and states provide more humane working conditions for them, with greater security and, of course, with decent wages fully paid.