03/27/2001 - Tuesday - Page A 38 LETTERS
Newsday - New York

Hiring Hall Is No Solution

Raymond Wysolmierski, Paul Aronow, Terry Sherwood

Regarding your editorial "Fund Community Center for Farmingville" [March 11]: The vast majority of the community is against Legis. Brian Foley's resolution to give $80,000 of taxpayer dollars to a community center that will be a hiring site where undocumented workers will be able to meet with contractors to hook up for a day's work. There is already a site where they can go, and that is the Department of Labor.

How can the Suffolk County legislators, who are the law-making (not law-breaking) part of our county government, see fit to give their "blessing" by awarding taxpayer monies to help and condone illegal activity? Instead of building a site where labor and tax laws will continue to be circumvented, why not put efforts into addressing the real issue, which is enforcement of all federal, state and labor laws? Taxpayer dollars should not be used for a hiring site to support undocumented workers who break immigration laws and are tax evaders.

Contractors who are guilty of the same should not be encouraged.

Terry Sherwood
Farmingville

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I suggest that Catholic Charities, which has offices in the North Ocean Avenue complex, offer a desk and telephone to volunteer workers for registering and booking of day workers with the contractors. No one has to wait outside.

Contractors know what workers and materials they need before they even start the job; keeping records will ensure that contractors will have to keep their word and can be evidence, if needed.

Paul Aronow Editor's

Note: The writer handles public relations for the Farmingville Civic Association. Holtsville

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Regarding your editorial about a hiring hall for undocumented workers ["Helping Hand," March 15]: If you build it, they will come-and come. If you build it and make them comfortable, they most surely will come-and stay. If they come and stay, they nevertheless will be exploited by slumlords and cheated by contractors. Invariably and inexorably, they will get caught up in an evil, dangerous and ever-growing underground economy, not to mention the occasional beatings that may befall them by hateful, drive-through white supremacist terrorists.

If you build it, they will not use it, at least not as a hiring site.

Attempts in Farmingdale, Glen Cove and Huntington have not succeeded.

So, where in all this is the great deal for day laborers or, for that matter, homeowners? I hope that no one is so naive as to think that, after it's built and we then have 5,000 aliens in Farmingville, "we'll all play nice." An illegally financed hiring site "legitimizes" illegality and encourages lawlessness, suggesting that it is all right to break laws not deemed "politically or religiously correct." So, when Newsday suggests that representative lawmakers become treasonous lawbreakers and "come through with funding for a hiring hail," we at Sachem Quality of Life, tired of talking to misguided church officials and incompetent elected officials, now say, "If you build it, we will sue."

Raymond Wysolmierski
Farmingville