Silvano Bautista said he started noticing new groups of workers at the day laborer stops in Yonkers last summer. Most of them were Venezuelan, he said, and staying at a nearby migrant hotel shelter.
Bautista, 45, gathers along the commercial corridor on Yonkers Avenue nearly every morning with a group of other longtime workers waiting for customers to hire them to paint, clean or do repair work for the day or week. When he saw the new arrivals joining their ranks, he said instead of asking them to stand elsewhere, he turned to help — offering advice on how to protect against wage theft and explaining the $16 hourly minimum wage.
“When I got to this country, I also suffered,” he said in Spanish, as he stood outside a hardware store. “I went through these circumstances that many immigrants who come here to the U.S. go through, who don’t have where to go or don’t have the right information to succeed.”
Like the day laborers in Yonkers, veteran immigrant workers are also finding ways to support the new migrant workforce amid the arrival of over 170,000 migrants in the last year-and-a-half. They warn migrants away from customers who are notorious for not paying and offer guidance on differing pay rates for masonry, painting or basic cleanup, reinforcing the minimum standards they’ve fought for within the informal industry.
And although federal, state and city officials have boosted efforts to help them obtain work permits, many migrants face monthslong backlogs in the immigration system, leaving them with little choice but to take “under the table” jobs like many others who arrived before them.
About 68,000 new arrivals remain in shelters in and around the city, including in Yonkers and White Plains.
And now Mayor Eric Adams’ new policies restricting shelter stays are pressuring even more migrants to turn to the underground economy to eke out a living and exit the city’s care, whether by cleaning houses, vending on the street or working construction.
“The…
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