On a snowy December morning, some 30 Hispanic male immigrants sat and talked or played pool in the recreation room at the Neighbors Link Northern Westchester community building on Columbus Avenue in Mount Kisco.
In an adjacent room separated by glass doors, several more men followed the words of a teacher in their English as a Second Language class. The classroom the previous day had held a congressional field hearing led by U.S. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the Putnam County Democrat.
The subject of the roughly hourlong hearing, the need for bipartisan House action on a comprehensive immigration reform bill, is an urgent and critical one for many of the 2,300 low-income immigrants, predominantly from Guatemala, directly served by Neighbors Link. Maloney in his opening remarks called the organization “such an important model for how we can come together” on the issue.
Snow days are not always slow days at the Neighbors Link Worker Center, where 7,000 jobs for general laborers and more skilled workers are secured annually. “Days of snow and things like that are days that people can come in and hire workers,” said Carola Bracco, executive director of Neighbors Link. Usually very few jobs are available from December through February, and a snow shoveling job “might be the only work they have that week.”
Founded in 2001 during a time of heightened tension between Hispanic immigrants and Mount Kisco police and house raids by local police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that led to arrests and deportations of illegal residents, the nonprofit emphasizes its mission “to strengthen the whole community by actively enhancing the healthy integration of immigrants.” That mission has attracted 300 volunteers to help in the adult, children and family programs run by Neighbors Link on a budget that will total from $1.5 million to $1.6 million in 2014.
The mission also has led Bracco, a former finance professional at General Electric Co., Ford Motor Co. and Time Inc. and one of nine children of middle-class Bolivian immigrants, to give cultural competency training to some 400 police officers in the county. She described the training as “conversations on how to successfully implement policing in culturally diverse communities and break down some of the myths police might have about immigrants.”
One of the organization”™s collaborative partners in the community, Northern Westchester Hospital, has created cultural competency training for its staff, she said. Joel Seligman, Northern Westchester Hospital president and CEO, warned at the Maloney hearing that the health care industry has a chronic workforce shortage and the hospital has been unable to recruit and develop local talent because of the unresolved “immigration problem.”
The Worker Center had been open for a few hours, but the men at the pool tables and café stools had not been hired for the day. With linguistic help from a translator, workers on their own arrange their hourly wage with contractors, homeowners and business employers who stop in. Most of the jobs are in landscaping ”“ and about 70 percent of that hiring is by homeowners ”“ but restaurant owners also show up looking to hire busboys and dishwashers.
“We have days when we might fill 60 or 70 jobs and we have days when we might have zero,” Bracco said. If an employer does not request a specific person to hire, available workers are picked from daily lottery drawings at the center.
The worker center “is pretty much half men and half women,” she said. “The women don”™t wait for work the way that men do.” They more often search the nonprofit”™s online Job Bank for domestic positions such as housekeepers, party servers and elder care workers. A skills development class in eco-cleaning has been “very empowering” for some women, Bracco said.
Workers centers like this one in Mount Kisco are a critically needed alternative to the street corner locations where immigrants wait to be picked up for hire in many communities. On the streets, many workers have been cheated out of wages or left with untreated workplace injuries by employers, Bracco said.
“These are huge issues. An organized workers center usually eliminates those.” At Neighbors Link, “We have zero unpaid wages,” Bracco said.
“No question, for both the employer and the worker, being an organized center causes everyone to step up their game.”
Among the regular job seekers at Neighbors Link, Mount Kisco resident Manuel Lemus spoke at the field hearing in English he has learned at the community center.
Lemus left Guatemala for the U.S. in 2007 and for five years worked as a warehouse manager in New Jersey. But eventually he lost his job because he did not have a work permit, he said. Now he takes English and other classes at Neighbors Link.
“For me, immigration reform opens many doors,” Lemus said. “Without reform, I cannot achieve my dreams.” With legislation that would eventually make him a legal resident of the U.S., he could go to college and travel to Guatemala to visit his family, he said.
For immigrant like Lemus, “We have hung out the ”˜Help Wanted”™ sign in this country,” Bracco said. “There has been a significant thirst for labor.” She said much the same in her testimony at the congressional field hearing.
She and others in Mount Kisco have seen that “for the generation that chooses to migrate, it is a traumatic experience full of loss and sacrifice,” she testified.
At Neighbors Link, staff and volunteers see families “dealing with the trauma and the loneliness and the anxiety of having migrated,” Bracco said.
But their reception in their new community is improving, she said.
“Twelve years ago in Mount Kisco, it was a tougher environment for immigrants. There was a lot of misunderstanding and fear. I think there”™s been a whole transition in that conversation.”
Still, for 21st century immigrants here, “I think it”™s tougher because this wave of immigrants lives and works in the suburbs. So it”™s more visible” than prior migrations of foreigners to American cities and factory jobs.
At Neighbors Link, “All that we can do is start to prepare so if there is immigration reform, there”™s enough legal support to process whatever documentation is required,” Bracco said.
