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by William Hillyard DANA POINT, CALIF. – Most days, the stretch of sidewalk along Doheny Park Road, just a couple blocks from Dana Point’s beachfront affluence, is an informal day labor hiring site. Most mornings, Latino men, the majority undocumented, wait here for employers offering temporary construction work. On an average day there are 20 to 50 workers ranging in age from their late teens into their 50s. But this is not an average day; today, with the bright blue Donut World donut shop as a backdrop, the site is a battleground. On one side, anti-immigration activists known as the Minutemen, have staged a direct confrontation with the day laborers to protest the right of undocumented workers to solicit work. And on the other side, another group has come to show solidarity with the day laborers. Pushed to the margins are the day laborers themselves. As the sweet scent of frying donuts hangs in the crisp morning air, the crowd grows. Perhaps 30 people all told — senior citizens mostly —spread out over the city block in groups of three or four. Their red, white, and blue clothing matches the American flag each carries. Many hold video cameras. A wiff of fresh tortillas wafts from the tortillaria across the street. Beside four lanes of traffic, a quartet of women sing the refrain from a country and western anthem at the top of their lungs. “I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I’m free.” They accompany a boombox cranked up to the point of distortion. The Minutemen Are Coming! Simcox now heads up the Phoenix, Arizona-based Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), the largest of the Minuteman organizations. His 9,000-member organization has 78 chapters in 36 states with an email newsletter circulation that tops 270,000. Since the first Minuteman muster in 2005, dozens of other groups have sprouted up across the country, some affiliated with the larger MCDC or Minuteman Project, others not. And while there is still a small contingent of Minutemen who stake out the border trying to curb illegal entry, the broader focus is changing. Most weekends now, Minuteman activists picket suburban day labor hiring sites in hopes of disrupting the hiring, driving the day laborers away and ultimately back across the border. The Minutemen see the immigrants as alien invaders who enter the country illegally and then tax the infrastructure. “They come here and steal that which we produce,” complains “Minuteman Larry” of the local Minutemen Project. Larry’s face is masked behind an enormous mustache, which, like his hair, is dyed jet black, grey roots showing. A red, white and blue pinwheel spins on top of the large sign he holds: ‘Only Traitors Hire Illegal Aliens.’ To his mind, immigrants cross the border in violation of immigration law, taking jobs away from Americans and straining the capacity of schools and hospitals. Since immigrants don’t pay taxes, he argues, the immigrants are instead a toll on these institutions. For anti-immigration activists like “Minuteman Larry,” who cannot make it to the border, protesting day labor sites has become a way to participate. According to MCDC Executive Director Al Garza, “This is a way for them to make a local impact.” MCDC sees day labor sites as lures that draw undocumented immigrants across the border into the United States. “We try to take away the magnets to illegal aliens,” he says; they hope that the immigrants will eventually give up and go home. With that as the goal, a local resident and Minuteman activist known to his fellow protesters as Rockerman for his long sun-bleached hair and ZZ-Top beard, arranged today’s protest promoting the event over the web forum of the anti-immigration group, Save Our State. Save Our State instigated the first rallies against day laborers in the area last year by targeting the city-supported day labor hiring center in Laguna Beach, California. The Laguna Beach site remains the target of frequent protests. Minuteman protests are also meant to bring the immigration debate into the public eye. Coupled with coordinated pressures on city councils, they have spurred new ordinances aimed at curtailing day laborers’ ability to find work. Bowing to public pressures, the Dana Point city council enacted an ordinance prohibiting solicitation of work from public property. Questions as to the legality of this law have since put its enforcement on hold. New anti-loitering laws recently passed in the nearby cities of Lake Forest and Mission Viejo have effectively shut down the day labor sites in those cities and similar legislation is being looked at in Suffolk County, New York and elsewhere across the country. The American Civil Liberties Union is currently suing Lake Forest on behalf of labor groups challenging the constitutionality of these laws. The Goons Gathering courage, with signs held like shields that read ‘Anti-Racism Anti-Minutemen,’ a hesitant group of counter protesters advances into the Minutemen’s lines. Clad in black and gray, many cover their young faces with black bandanas. These are high school and college age kids — ‘The Goons,’ the Minutemen call them, naming them, ironically, after union-busting thugs of the 1930s. Less well organized, the counter protesters are a direct reaction to the Minutemen, who they believe are attacking victims rather than addressing root issues. “It doesn’t solve the problem, going after poor people,” says anti-Minutemen protester, Naui. “[The Minutemen] feel that the quote unquote illegals are driving the wages down. Why don’t they go after the big guys? Why don’t they protest the big agricultural corporations?” The anti-Minutemen protesters see corporations such as large agricultural concerns and sweatshops as a root of the problem. As they see it, these corporations exploit immigrants with substandard wages, deplorable working conditions, and a disregard for workers’ safety and civil rights. “If [the Minutemen] were really concerned with slave wages they would go after those people,” says Naui. Well known to the Minutemen, Naui is a regular at the weekend protests and counter-protests. During the week, he works side-by-side with immigrant workers as a laborer on his uncle’s landscaping crew. He comes to these protests, he says, to show solidarity with the day laborers and to ensure that the Minutemen do not harass them. “Some are really hateful; they want Mexicans out of here,” he says. “I think a lot of them are racists.” (concluded on page 2) |
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