Abdul Umar was 16 when he came to New York from Pakistan, his spirit high on the American Dream. It was 1983, and Umar was eager to make his mark in the city. The only problem was, he wasn’t supposed to work, having entered the country on a visitor’s visa.

Nevertheless, he soon found a job as a candy store assistant making $3 an hour, he says. The salary was slightly below the $3.35 minimum wage at the time, but Umar did not complain.

"People are happy to employ those who don’t have the green card," says Umar, who laughs when he remembers the various jobs he had before 1995, when he was granted permanent resident status. Illegal immigrants are willing to work for whomever hires them, even when the job entails substandard wages and extra hours, he says.

Umar’s tale could easily be one of many of the city’s estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants today who continue to feel powerless at the hands of employers. But part of that powerlessness is derived from many immigrants’ ignorance about the rights they have.

"It’s not that workers don’t have a voice. It’s just that they don’t know that they do," says Ben Sacks, co-coordinator of the Workplace Justice Project of Make the Road by Walking, an organization that represents low-wage immigrant workers in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Workers are guaranteed the minimum wage and overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, says Betsy McCormick, assistant commissioner of communications at the New York State Division of Labor. The act covers nearly all full and part-time workers, both legal and illegal working in the private sector and in federal, state and local governments.

Yet many undocumented workers accept whatever jobs they can get in such industries as construction, taxi driving or the garment business out of fear or ignorance.

"When you’re undocumented, what kind of job can you get? All the jobs that other people will not do, for less pay," says Naheed Chughtai, who helps run the Pakistani Community Center in Midwood, Brooklyn, with her husband, Shafqat Chughtai.

"Anybody who can’t find a job is willing to work for $150-$200 a week. An American would get $400 or $450. If an undocumented person goes, they’re going to offer him $150-$200, because they don’t have a choice," she says.

The shopkeeper whose hands are portrayed above said he arrived to this country legally and the store at which he works employs no illegal workers. But he, like many people in Little Pakistan, was reluctant to have his photograph taken.