Burning Atlanta

This is an interesting little piece that points out a few issues, one of which is the fact that not all day laborers are illegals. Another tidbit seems to be that those that hire people off the corners prefer Hispanics/illegals.

Don't hire illegals

ATLANTA -- Outside the Home Depot on Ponce de Leon Avenue, no one engages in theoretical debates about whether illegal immigrants are competing for jobs with Americans.

Here, the competition unfolds whenever a truck pulls into the parking lot, its driver looking for day laborers.

On any given day, about half of the 30 or so men waiting to pounce on those trucks are Latinos, many of them undocumented. But the rest are African American men like Sam Gibbs. One chilly afternoon, Gibbs, 47, sprinted like a teenager toward a red pickup, hawking his services to two black men inside.

Jose Diaz, 38, an illegal immigrant from Michoacan, Mexico, said he regularly saw employers shun African American workers. "They don't want to pick them up because they don't like to work," he said.

"It's 100% true that we work harder than they do," said Victor Reyes, 45, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, confident that his comments in Spanish would go unnoticed by the black workers within earshot.

The men said there were times when it helped to be a black American. Some employers refused to hire illegal immigrants, and some jobs required a native speaker's command of English.

Though the black workers were resentful of illegal immigrants, they also felt sorry for them. They said they knew first-hand how a day laborer could be injured, stiffed by the boss or left stranded in the boondocks with no bus service. They knew that most illegal immigrants would not complain the way black Americans would because they feared deportation.

"There's nothing they can do," Smith said. "They can't play no defense. They can't call the police."