Inside the Life of the Migrants Next Door

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The community's complaints against the newcomers are varied and vigorous. Neighbors rail against single-family homes that are carved into hostels housing a dozen or more men at a time. Uninsured drivers, some of whom display the daredevil driving style of rural Latin America, anger local motorists. Day laborers looking for work clog parking lots, and they are more than just an inconvenience. Flooding the market with cheap labor, they're driving down wages for everyone. Even some of the more established undocumented workers are critical of the newcomers. "A hard worker used to be able to make $15 an hour here," says Gabriel, 33, a Tuxpan native who owns a small gardening business and who, like many of the people interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified by surname. "But there are too many workers here now. They're working for $10 an hour."

A crowd of Ecuadorian day laborers gathered at the East Hampton train station in the fall were asking $12 an hour. The employers who stopped by ranged from heating repairmen to housemoms. Homeowners and renters make up almost half of those who hire day laborers, according to a recently published UCLA study. The day laborers, who exist on the bottom of the undocumented-worker food chain, say they feel slightly shut out by those immigrants who already have a foothold in the Hamptons. "Their attitude is, we were here first," says a worker named Oscar. "But we deserve the same chance they had."

The old-timers, for their part, complain about the newcomers' work ethic. "The people who come these days just see the nice cars or the money on the streets of Tuxpan," says Coria. "They don't know how much hard work it takes to make it in the Hamptons. So many of them come, get disillusioned very quickly and return to Mexico empty handed."

Octavio, 19, a shy mechanic from a poor settlement outside Tuxpan, knows how hard it can be, and he is trying to hold on. In March he paid $2,200 to a door-to-door smuggling service that picked him up in Tuxpan and dropped him off in the Hamptons. But it was no luxury ride. The trip took eight days, including three days and nights of nonstop driving from Douglas, Ariz., where he walked across the border, to the Hamptons. The Chevy Astro van that took him through the U.S. was crammed with 13 people--11 other Tuxpeño passengers and two alternating drivers. "I wasn't ever scared," Octavio says about the journey. "Just very tired." After he arrived, it took only a few weeks for his English-speaking uncle to find him a job in an auto-repair shop and a room to rent. Octavio now lives in a single-family home that got the illegal immigrant makeover: slap a lock on every bedroom and try to squeeze in as many families and workers as possible. He pays $500 a month to share his home with eight other workers he doesn't know and barely trusts.