The Washington Times
Fairfax County, which is studying proposals for a tax-funded center for day laborers, could have had a privately funded center already up and operating, activists say, if neighborhood opposition had not scuttled a grass-roots effort in 1994.
In June 1994, a coalition of county officials and activists proposed a pilot program that would have used private funds to set up a trailer near a convenience store in the Culmore area of the county, where scores of day laborers gathered and loitered while waiting for work. The crowded parking lot drew complaints from nearby merchants and passers-by.
But the plan fell apart after area residents balked at the proposal to encourage the workers to relocate to a trailer on a nearby vacant lot.
Eleven years later, day laborers still congregate at the same 7-Eleven, and officials say the attendant problems -- public drinking and urination, litter and harassment of women -- are worse.
This is the same 7-Eleven in the Culmore neighborhood that was made infamous by the 9-11 hijackers with the aid off an illegal from El Salvador.
According to the FBI, on August 1st, 2001, two of the suspected hijackers had gotten Virginia ID cards from the DMV. They had gone to Arlington, Virginia, found an obliging stranger, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador and paid him $100. In exchange, he took them to a notary public, where he signed a DL 51 form saying that he, a resident of Virginia, knew them to be residents of the state too. They weren't, of course, but he let them use his old address in Falls Church.
The following day, four more of the suspected hijackers got Virginia DMV ID cards. On some of their proof of residency forms, the Virginia residents who vouched for them were their own comrades, who had just gotten their cards the day before. Later in August, another of the suspects got his Virginia ID.
Posted by Suzanne at August 22, 2005