In late August, Levy announced that county police had begun a crackdown against “unlicensed” contractors, many of whom hire immigrant workers as day laborers for construction and maintenance work. After announcing that police in a “sting” operation had issued 80 tickets to contractors for not paying sales tax, failure to obtain a license, and other violations, Levy told an August 24 news conference, “We are here to enforce the laws, not just sales tax, not just unemployment or workers compensation insurance, but also federal immigration laws.”

To carry this out, in November Levy announced his plan to give local cops the power to check on workers’ immigration status and hand over those without proper documents to federal immigration agents for deportation. Under current law, local cops are prohibited from asking those they stop about their legal status.

Protests against these moves were organized by a number of immigrant rights organizations. Editorials in Newsday and the New York Times, two of the area’s main daily papers, came out against the proposal. Levy also faced opposition from the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) for its own reasons. PBA president Jeffrey Frayler said the law would “make illegal immigrants less likely to report crimes,” the New York Times reported.

Levy has since modified his plan to have it apply only to guards in the county’s jails, who, if Levy gets his way, will have the power to turn over immigrants who end up there to the federal immigration police. The Times reported that this could have affected 2,349 of the more than 23,000 people arrested in the county in 2003. Levy announced that he plans to meet December 14 with federal immigration officials about expanding “information sharing” and other cooperation between local and federal cop agencies.

In addition to this proposal, local politicians in the towns of Farmingdale and Brookhaven have taken steps to crack down on foreign-born workers by going after working-class housing complexes and homes under the guise of “housing code” violations. In Brookhaven, an “informal task force” has been set up to investigate complaints about homes supposedly crowded with day laborers.

In Farmingdale, two successive city mayors have been trying to get an apartment complex where many day laborers and other workers live—which former Farmingdale mayor Joseph Trudden admitted are “the only apartments in Farmingdale”—declared a “blighted” area and razed. The new mayor, George Graf, has vowed to complete the project. Graf claimed that the former mayor had allowed the town to be “overrun” by day laborers and promised to get them “off our streets.”

Graf also instituted fines for contractors who pick up day laborers along a street where they had often waited for work. Once a number of contractors started getting slapped with the town’s new $100 fine, the mayor said, “the crowds [of laborers] have thinned.”

“From the news reports you could get the wrong impression that there’s a groundswell of anti-immigrant sentiment,” said Nadia Marin-Molina, executive director of the Workplace Project, in a December 10 phone interview. The Workplace Project is a Hempstead-based immigrant rights group that has been closely involved with the day laborers’ struggle “There is very broad sentiment against what Levy is doing…. He is casting all immigrants as criminals, not only undocumented immigrants.”

Marin-Molina described the tug-of-war that has been going on between workers and the government for years, as the Latino population in Long Island doubled in the 1990s and has jumped by 20 percent in the last three years alone. She said that the fights of the last several years to counter the anti-immigrant campaign have brought together a broad network of groups, and workers have made some gains.

“But what Levy is doing does put boldness into those who would like to see the world that way,” Marin-Molina said. She described the recent case of day laborers protesting outside the home of a construction contractor who had underpaid them, being told by the contractor, “Steve Levy’s my friend, I’ll call him and get you deported.”

Levy recently spoke to a meeting of the Greater Farmingville Community Association, headed by Raymond Wysolmierski, a former spokesman of the rightist organization Sachem Quality of Life. These groups have regularly picketed corners where day laborers seek work, carrying signs that say “deport illegal immigrants” and other rightist messages.

“They who refuse to accept that this is an invasion and occupation are in a state of denial,” Wysolmierski wrote in a column in the November 11 Newsday, referring to the increasing immigration. He called on the citizens of Farmingville “to bear the burden of restoring a divided nation to its former self.”

The ultrarightist campaign has included the firebombing of a Mexican family’s home in 2003 and the near fatal beating of two day laborers in 2000. Despite all this, day laborers have won greater rights over the past five years. They have established hiring halls in Freeport and Glen Cove, for example, giving the workers greater control over relations with employers and a safer means of getting work. A similar hiring hall is being set up in Hempstead, Marin-Molina said.

And, as they have been doing for a number of years, day laborers have been organizing to picket homes of employers to demand back pay and living wages, and are continuing efforts to get secure hiring areas established in a number of Long Island towns. A Day Laborers Union has also been established to fight for these demands.  
 
 
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