Big talk, little action

By Timothy Pratt

Saturday, Sept. 23, 2006 | 7:37 a.m.

Standing in an Eastern Avenue parking lot Friday morning, a broad-shouldered Jose Garcia has one eye on the road for pickup trucks with drivers seeking laborers. His words are deliberate:

"They have a solution to all this."

He is referring to the restless waiting surrounding him, recent crimes against day laborers, police who moments earlier had cited two men across the street for trespassing, bounced checks from crooked employers, complaints from businesses nearby.

"A center would fix it," Garcia concludes. A day-labor center, like those set up in California, with sign-up sheets, a place for workers to wait for employers.

Others think not.

Take Donald Nance, director of the Minutemen of Las Vegas. He was expected to lead a protest against day laborers this morning along Eastern, south of Pebble Road.

His solution: "They need to go home."

Until that happens, Nance says, local authorities "need to use laws against things like urinating in public and trespassing to take care of the issue."

The issue of day laborers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, has gathered steam for more than two years, long before they were victims of two robberies this week, one of which ended in a homicide.

Officials tried to build an ordinance to get rid of the laborers in late 2004. Clark County spent $24,500 to train a camera on the laborers for nine days last spring, and visited a center in California where workers and employers legally meet.

Nothing came of it.

"Clearly, what seems to me to have happened is that politics got in the way of policy," says Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, who was at many of those meetings and favored building centers throughout the valley.

James Spinello, assistant director at Clark County Administrative Services, shepherded the county staff, researching possible solutions to the issue. He says it became impossible for local governments to act when faced with the possibility of new federal immigration laws.

"The reality is the timing ran headlong into the national debate, with discussion in Congress on everything from putting a fence along the border to making any kinds of government assistance to undocumented immigrants illegal.

"It became difficult to pass local laws."

Euclides del Moral, alternate consul for Mexico in Las Vegas, also attended some of those meetings. He recalls another obstacle in the effort to find a place for laborers to gather: Who should run them and who should pay for them?

"The discussion was, how can you justify paying for it with taxpayer money if they're illegal immigrants?" he says.

When Spinello presented the results of a county task force charged with studying the issue to a body of regional governments last November, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman was less than impressed.

"So much of the things that we do in government is we talk about it, and we don't do anything about it," he began.

"It's a huge issue for business owners as well as the people who live in the area, and I'd really like to see it addressed a lot sooner than later," Goodman continued.

But when Spinello pointed out that each municipality needed to take his group's recommendations and decide what to do with them, Goodman replied, "So we're all on our own."

The issue never was brought up in a meeting of the Southern Nevada Regional Planning Coalition again.

A year later, on Friday morning, Garcia and about 30 day laborers are waiting for work across the street from Star Nursery.

Dozens more fanned out along the road in the half-mile stretch from Pebble Road to I-215.

Garcia and others cite a list of obstacles working against them, illustrated by their stories from recent weeks:

Garcia explains that many laborers carry cash in their pockets, making them vulnerable to thieves, because they either don't trust banks or don't think they can open accounts.

They also don't know whether they'll be arrested or deported from one day to the next.

Wade Bohn, managing partner of Jay's Market, next to Star Nursery on Eastern, says he's amazed that Garcia and the rest are still there, after almost two years of his complaints to local governments and Metro Police.

He says his store on Eastern is the only one of four in the valley where sales have dropped during the last 21 months, and he blames day laborers for driving customers away.

"The frustrating thing is, nobody's doing anything about it," he says.

Sgt. Jason Letkiewicz of South Central Area Command says Metro is in "a very difficult position.

"For the most part, these are people who want to work hard and provide for their families.

"They're not out there committing major crimes other than the immigration issue. But the federal government hasn't decided how major that issue is."