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Brooklyn’s Pakistani community has its share of undocumented immigrants, says Maqbool Khan, 50, who helps people file out immigration documents from an office on Coney Island Avenue and has been living here since 1973. Most are documented, he says, but those who aren’t are usually single men.
Although community leaders and residents report stories of undocumented workers being paid less than documented workers for the same job, Jan Khan, 33, says no one without documentation is hired at the Coney Island Avenue grocery store in which he works. But Khan doesn’t know who in the community is there legally and who is not. "You cannot ask anybody [whether] you have paper [or] you don’t have, because this is a personal matter," he says.
If immigrants decide to complain to the state’s labor division, they are not asked to disclose their immigration status, says the labor division’s McCormick. "We do not make referrals to the Immigration and Naturalization Service," she says. "An undocumented worker can come to our offices and lodge a complaint and we’d investigate it like any other." For that reason, the agency has no definitive data on the number of illegal workers. Sometimes it takes a while for immigrants to realize they are being treated unfairly. Moses Kofi did not file any official complaints after arriving in New York from Ghana in 1987 on a six-month visitor’s visa. During that time, he landed a job with a security firm in Hackensack, NJ, where he made $3.75 an hour – $1.25 less than the $5 wage paid to legal workers. "The only time I felt cheated was when I went to apply for a job that they would pay the Americans more than they would pay me," says Kofi. His weekly paycheck of $120 was barely enough to cover the $100-per-week rent for his room in a boarding house. "But, you know, I had no complaints, because I didn’t have my papers at that time," he says. "But now I wouldn’t take anything like that."
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