“We’ve received community members that have stated very upfront that they are scared to sometimes leave the house, go to work, do their normal activities in the neighborhood or take their kids to summer programming,” she said.
One laborer outside Walgreens told KQED he’s drastically reduced how much time he spends out of the house, leaving virtually only to work at this point.
“I don’t think there’s a way to protect yourself,” he said. “What you can do is avoid going out a lot, and only go out to the [day laborer] stops out of necessity.”
He’s also altered his work routine. On days he might have once stood around on Foothill through the afternoon, he now waits just a few hours in the morning to see if a truck rolls into the lot with a job.
“You only come out here for a bit because there’s no other way, and after that, you get exhausted,” he said. “Before, with more confidence, people stayed longer. You felt more free.”
Struggling to find work
Laborers said even as their numbers drop, work is becoming harder to find.
Potential employers “don’t come” any longer, one told KQED in Spanish. “Some say they are afraid. They are afraid of coming to hire people.”
Workers said there have been weeks when they’ve found work for only a few days. Other weeks, there’s been none at all.
Multiple day laborers told KQED that they used to work for companies but were recently let go or had their hours cut short. One works for an electrical company where he’s promised 25 hours of work a week.
But he said he’s only been getting about five hours consistently, and he has had to supplement his income by picking up more one-off jobs.
“The company also went down and has less staff and is letting people go,” he said. “We don’t know the motive.”
Federal immigration law bars employers from hiring people who are not authorized to work in the U.S. Historically, the government has rarely targeted companies or people who do hire these workers, but it’s possible that they could face prosecution, fines and even jail time.
Although some employees at Street Level believe the labor downturn could be a regular summer slump, the nonprofit’s employment advocate, Steve Robles Ramirez, doesn’t anticipate work picking back up in the fall. If it does, he said, Street Level will be focused on trying to help protect immigrant laborers from the new reality they face under the Trump administration.
“We’ve heard from a lot of day laborers that they fear that a lot of bosses now can freely be comfortable with their bigotry and their racism,” he told KQED. “I think this has become normalized, unfortunately. The people who are employing our day laborers already have that power over them, which could just lead to a lot of exploitation.
“While this isn’t new … I think it’s been amplified to another level, to where it’s a real crisis,” he said.
KQED’s Gina Castro contributed to this report.
