Two times this week I biked past a parked car and it emitted a horrible high pitched buzzing at me. I'm guessing it's supposed to be an anti-theft mechanism(entirely unnecessary in a Midwest suburb). I of course had no intention of stealing the car, but the noise triggers a desire to do other things to the car. I guess the owner is lucky I'm not an angsty teenager.
There's so much unnecessary noise pollution in our society, it makes me really sad.
I've noticed that car alarms that go off for no good reason seem to be back. Those used to be a thing, but they'd mostly disappeared. But I keep hearing them in parking lots, with nobody anywhere near the car. At least they shut off after a while. That was legislated back in the 1980s.
I was in my garage with my keys in my back pocket, checking the tire pressure on my truck, when it started honking at me. My butt triggered the panic button.
I have acute hearing. That was painful and hardly deliberate!
Not sure if it's the same thing but many stores will put noise emitting machines in their parking lots to make it hostile for people who wanna sleep in their cars there
Once you first notice it you'll realize these machines are kinda everywhere
I am confused about the situation. Can someone with more context please explain? Is HomeDepot forcing their own workers off the parking lot? Or are there some other workers there? What do they do on a parking lot? Are they in cars or on foot? Why do they stay on the parking lot the whole day, if they are not HomeDepot employees?
The operative word is "day laborers". These are people who work on a day-to-day basis. In America at least, there is a large contingent of people who are informal day laborers, especially Hispanic immigrants apparently, although I'm not sure if that's really true or just a stereotype, and a lot of them hang out or around at home improvement stores, waiting to be hired for various handyman-type jobs.
It is frequently referenced in American media, like South Park (in "D-Yikes") and Mike Judge's Beavis and Butthead (in "The Day Butt-Head Went Too Far"). And well, probably some other media that isn't adult cartoons, but for some reason that was what first immediately came to mind.
I was aware of the stereotype of Hispanic day laborers hanging out in Home Depot parking lots for a long time, but it was interesting to see the degree to which it seems to be true in California, where I often saw fairly large groups of people that I believed to be day laborers in the parking lot. I'm sure there are also day laborers at home improvement stores in the Midwest too, but I don't really pay that much attention, so I haven't noticed it much.
edit: I see I took too long to reply and now am the sixth or so person to point this out, sorry. Race condition.
Japan too has a lot of day laborers too -single men usually without a family support structure or they left their families for reasons. In Japan the day laborers are almost exclusively Japanese as they don't tolerate illegal immigration much.
In fact, quite shockingly to many, that prevailing twofold sentiment, which sees stereotypical thinking as faulty cognition and stereotypes themselves as patently inaccurate, is itself wrong on both counts. - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2018...
Most stereotypes that have been studied have been shown to be approximately correct. Usually, stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50, making them some of the largest relationships ever found in social psychology. - https://www.cspicenter.com/p/the-accuracy-of-stereotypes-dat...
There is a far cry between "Stereotypes are generally accurate" and "being able to make a specific measured claim on the basis of a stereotype."
You also don't actively prove this claim, which means that we may know that it's "more likely to be true than not" based on your shared information, but could still absolutely be false.
Which leads me to my question, "Why would you make a comment about the correctness of stereotypes, rather than just finding actual data about the stereotype in question?"
You have not disproved that the concepts are opposed in this instance. Which matters much more than whether or not "stereotypes might generally be true." Like, at best stereotypes are a distraction for the actual data we'd like to have discussions about.
It's not that I don't believe it is likely, it's more like I don't like spreading an unqualified stereotype that I haven't actually validated in any way other than personal anecdotes. It's not like it's a terribly harmful stereotype (at least, I don't have anything against day laborers at all) but just as a matter of good hygiene I believe it's good to hedge a bit when you're spreading information that is essentially folklore. (In this case the point was to spread the folklore part, so I didn't feel it necessary to go and try to validate it with data myself.)
The workers do not work for HomeDepot. They come to the Home Deport parking lot ready to offer their services. People unrelated to HomeDepot will come to the parking lot and offer temporary work, landscaping, construction, etc.
Day laborers are an independent labor force who do construction, landscaping, and other manual work for a negotiated cash rate. In Los Angeles they hang out in public spaces in groups, often near hardware stores, to make themselves easy to find and hire.
Day laborers at Home Depot are generally undocumented immigrants who hang around in the parking lot hoping to get hired for quick handyman type jobs. This is why they've been a target for ICE raids
They are "day laborers." People who hang around there hoping to find work helping with your home repairs, painting, appliance installation, landscaping, or other projects etc.
Huh, and that works? Sounds a bit… old-fashioned? I’d think people are looking for these services online or in some gig work app. Interesting. Sounds unpleasant both for workers that have to hang around on the street, and customers that are approached (at least that’s how I imagine it) by people offering services even when they don’t need it. (Or do customers approach workers themselves?) From the outside, sounds weird. I wonder what in the US caused it.
They are mostly hired by the contractors who advertise their services online and through aps, who go to HD several times a day anyways. The final customer deals with the contractors, not with the day laborers.
At least at the Home Depot near me, the day laborers sit near the parking lot exits on the boulevard.
I go to Home Depot more than is reasonable, and I’ve never been approached by them. You typically would need to solicit them yourself. In general I find them to be respectful and pleasant - I imagine otherwise they would get customer complaints and Home Depot would have them trespassed immediately.
From others experiences I’ve talked to, they usually form “crews” with one main “crew chief” guy who speaks English you negotiate a rate and number of workers you need, and any specific skills like concrete, framing, etc. beyond simple labor. You generally are expected to provide any tools needed to complete the job beyond what fits in a standard tool belt.
> Huh, and that works? Sounds a bit… old-fashioned? I’d think people are looking for these services online or in some gig work app.
You need to go to the home improvement store to get materials for your job anyway, you can also pick up some people to help, too.
Why fuss on an app trying to figure out who to hire, when you can head over, say 'hey, who knows how to dig a foundation' or 'who can help me hang a door' or whatever your job is. Maybe find the worker first and they can help you shop for the stuff you need.
Small concrete / roofing company / construction company might need some more hands for a day or two for a project.
They go in to grab materials, leave with materials and some potentially new workers. If it works out (and it often does) they may use them for other projects, too.
Source: My father in law was a carpenter for about 40 years
Someone installed one of these at a shop in SFbay a couple years ago and I tracked it down, took an SPL recording snapshot, and emailed the city to report a violation of noise laws with the proof. The noisemaker was physically uninstalled after a few weeks and did not return. So, presumably Home Depot is violating LA Noise Ordinance, and could reasonably be expected to accrue fines or even forced to cease operating their retail business on that property, given a properly filed code violation report; and, since any persistent sound levels necessary to cause discomfort are almost certainly an OSHA violation, a side copy to the relevant Home Depot worker unions in LA/Cali/US might produce a rather significant result as well.
Home Depot making themselves less useful for their own customers. Galaxy brain.
For the apparenly many people who are baffled by this, it's not like this is some unrelated activity that Home Depot doesn't benefit from. It's super convenient to go pick up both the paint and the painters from the same place at the same time without even any planning. No emails or phone calles or coordinating schedules.
What should Home Depot be doing? They don’t control the administration or the ICE raids. Forcing day laborers off the property ensures less raids happen on the property—I haven’t really understood the boycotts.
Home Depot put up the cameras to deal with organized crime, both theft and gift-card fraud. Flock specifically advertises that Home Depot put up the cameras to deal with gift card fraud:
> The Home Depot leveraged Flock Safety’s technology to close a case involving a multi-state gift card tampering ring, resulting in fraud and property theft charges exceeding $300,000. This type of success underscores how powerful connected data can be in mitigating fraud risks. [0]
Aside from that, Home Depot has been dealing with massive, multi-state, organized theft campaigns. Earlier this month, NY prosecutors lodged 780 counts of theft against thirteen suspects who stole millions of dollars of merchandise from Home Depot stores in nine states [1].
It is really no different than having drug dealers set up shop on your corner and sharing footage with police. You have people who are likely committing criminal activity (multiple crimes in the day laborer case) and are sharing footage with the relevant authorities.
The politicization of enforcement doesn’t change that as a business owner I would not want to own the location people facilitate illegal transactions.
In your world view immigrants working jobs you find beneath you is the same as someone selling drugs?
> likely committing criminal activity
You understand that exploiting day laborers to circumvent labor laws puts the, mostly civil though vanishingly rare criminal, liability on the employer rather than the employee, right?
We use laws rather than your own personal hatred of immigrants to define criminality.
I’ve done landscaping, home repair, fence construction, outdoor painting. My family still actively does. I don’t find them beneath me.
Working under the table without work authorization is actually spectacularly illegal as an employer and employee. Tax evasion is also spectacularly illegal as an individual.
Killing a comment that links to dot gov sources about undocumnteds' being protected, rather than prosecuted, by labor law and showing immigrants pay taxes is fascinating indeed.
"A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund."
The reason it’s dead is these are completely irrelevant and you aren’t having a conversation, you’re taking a pulpit.
California does not dictate federal labor law and I’m sure that you already know that. Your arguments are bad and aggressive.
You’d have way more influence and agreement if you argued about immigration processes as a whole (“why are these people with jobs not given visas already?”) than these contrived obviously ridiculous and irrelevant excerpts.
You’re arguing with me like I won’t actually think about what you say, which is the “not the HN style” comment I gave you before. I will.
You seem to not be reading anything I’m saying. I have family that works for legally operated blue collar businesses.
The difference is engaging in criminal activity.
Your arguments are spectacularly lazy so I’ll ask you to show me where people not authorized to work in the country have no legal liability if they choose to work in the country.
I don’t really know what’s ruffled your feathers so much here, but this isn’t really how HN operates. It seems like you got a bit flustered when the “you’re a bad rich person” argument didn’t work, and now you’re just flailing wildly.
Killing a comment that links to dot gov sources about undocumnteds' being protected, rather than prosecuted, by labor law and showing immigrants pay taxes is fascinating indeed.
"A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly
$100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while
many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund."
I always thought having day laborers chilling in Home Depot parking lots was a net positive thing for the store and a bit of an untapped potential. Companies pay a lot of money to insert themselves in the hiring stream, and here is Home Depot as the defacto meeting point for a substantial amount of economic activity. Surely a more intelligent and less frightened company could make something positive out of this.
But that's what you get with a fear-based political leadership. ICE targets day laborers not because of the horrible damage they do to the US economy, but because they have been selected as the scapegoats du jour.
How can an intelligent company make money from illegal activity in your opinion? Day laborers hang in the parking lot because they can't work legally, if they could then they could use HD's contractor portal and bid on jobs there.
Could there be a motif unrelated to ICE ? That Home Depot does not like that day labourers are loitering and approaching customers entering and leaving the store.
This is why I don't hire them. I have nothing against their business model, but I'd expect I'd be the guy who gets unlucky and an illegal "gets hurt" (on purpose) then the court actually awards them a gazillion dollars when they claim I'm the evil unregulated employer smashing down the poor man with my lack of liability insurance and whatever long list of other things you need to hand someone else a dollar for a job.
Not every society works off democracy. And the Mayflower pilgrims never joined the society of native Americans. The was a treaty between them, but it was broken by the native American side.
Home Depot isn't democratically elected, but you should sign up for survivor if you want to vote people out. Functioning democracies don't work that way.
The mundane activity of voting on rules to outline a formal legal process isn't what I'm talking about.
What I'm rejecting is the idea in the parent comment that democracies can vote directly on expelling entire classes of people. There's a long history of such political expulsions and none of them are periods to look back on fondly. The expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland killed tens of thousands, and the expulsions of native americans speak for themselves, as does the legacy of operation wetback.
And for what it's worth, I've had the distinct pleasure of being interrogated by the Mexican military at gunpoint while hiking because they thought I was a coyote. I've also been held in the small rooms on the US side. I'm extremely familiar with both sides of that particular border.
>The noise is in earshot of IDEPSCA’s day laborer center
I find it misleading to add this line in the article without mentioning if the decibels exceed the applicable noise ordinances, or situation this is just people on HD's property complaining about the noise they are making on their own property. In that case people are free not to visit.
It's their property so they should be able to do what they want with it. Stopping people from complaining is impossible. If you were to smash an iPhone someone would complain about how you wasted it or something, but ultimately it's up to the owner on how they want to handle their property.
Two times this week I biked past a parked car and it emitted a horrible high pitched buzzing at me. I'm guessing it's supposed to be an anti-theft mechanism(entirely unnecessary in a Midwest suburb). I of course had no intention of stealing the car, but the noise triggers a desire to do other things to the car. I guess the owner is lucky I'm not an angsty teenager.
There's so much unnecessary noise pollution in our society, it makes me really sad.
I've noticed that car alarms that go off for no good reason seem to be back. Those used to be a thing, but they'd mostly disappeared. But I keep hearing them in parking lots, with nobody anywhere near the car. At least they shut off after a while. That was legislated back in the 1980s.
Sometimes it can be a genuine mistake.
I was in my garage with my keys in my back pocket, checking the tire pressure on my truck, when it started honking at me. My butt triggered the panic button.
I have acute hearing. That was painful and hardly deliberate!
Not sure if it's the same thing but many stores will put noise emitting machines in their parking lots to make it hostile for people who wanna sleep in their cars there
Once you first notice it you'll realize these machines are kinda everywhere
I am confused about the situation. Can someone with more context please explain? Is HomeDepot forcing their own workers off the parking lot? Or are there some other workers there? What do they do on a parking lot? Are they in cars or on foot? Why do they stay on the parking lot the whole day, if they are not HomeDepot employees?
The operative word is "day laborers". These are people who work on a day-to-day basis. In America at least, there is a large contingent of people who are informal day laborers, especially Hispanic immigrants apparently, although I'm not sure if that's really true or just a stereotype, and a lot of them hang out or around at home improvement stores, waiting to be hired for various handyman-type jobs.
It is frequently referenced in American media, like South Park (in "D-Yikes") and Mike Judge's Beavis and Butthead (in "The Day Butt-Head Went Too Far"). And well, probably some other media that isn't adult cartoons, but for some reason that was what first immediately came to mind.
I was aware of the stereotype of Hispanic day laborers hanging out in Home Depot parking lots for a long time, but it was interesting to see the degree to which it seems to be true in California, where I often saw fairly large groups of people that I believed to be day laborers in the parking lot. I'm sure there are also day laborers at home improvement stores in the Midwest too, but I don't really pay that much attention, so I haven't noticed it much.
edit: I see I took too long to reply and now am the sixth or so person to point this out, sorry. Race condition.
See season 7, episode 4 (“Sex Ed”) of The Office for a non-cartoon media reference :)
Japan too has a lot of day laborers too -single men usually without a family support structure or they left their families for reasons. In Japan the day laborers are almost exclusively Japanese as they don't tolerate illegal immigration much.
> as they don't tolerate illegal immigration much
They don't really tolerate legal immigration, or legal immigrants, either.
> I'm not sure if that's really true or just a stereotype
Stereotype Accuracy is One of the Largest and Most Replicable Effects in All of Social Psychology - https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/stereoty...
In fact, quite shockingly to many, that prevailing twofold sentiment, which sees stereotypical thinking as faulty cognition and stereotypes themselves as patently inaccurate, is itself wrong on both counts. - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/insight-therapy/2018...
Most stereotypes that have been studied have been shown to be approximately correct. Usually, stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50, making them some of the largest relationships ever found in social psychology. - https://www.cspicenter.com/p/the-accuracy-of-stereotypes-dat...
There is a far cry between "Stereotypes are generally accurate" and "being able to make a specific measured claim on the basis of a stereotype."
You also don't actively prove this claim, which means that we may know that it's "more likely to be true than not" based on your shared information, but could still absolutely be false.
Which leads me to my question, "Why would you make a comment about the correctness of stereotypes, rather than just finding actual data about the stereotype in question?"
Because the phrasing "true OR a stereotype" implied the concepts are opposed, when they are anything but.
You have not disproved that the concepts are opposed in this instance. Which matters much more than whether or not "stereotypes might generally be true." Like, at best stereotypes are a distraction for the actual data we'd like to have discussions about.
It's not that I don't believe it is likely, it's more like I don't like spreading an unqualified stereotype that I haven't actually validated in any way other than personal anecdotes. It's not like it's a terribly harmful stereotype (at least, I don't have anything against day laborers at all) but just as a matter of good hygiene I believe it's good to hedge a bit when you're spreading information that is essentially folklore. (In this case the point was to spread the folklore part, so I didn't feel it necessary to go and try to validate it with data myself.)
The workers do not work for HomeDepot. They come to the Home Deport parking lot ready to offer their services. People unrelated to HomeDepot will come to the parking lot and offer temporary work, landscaping, construction, etc.
Day laborers are an independent labor force who do construction, landscaping, and other manual work for a negotiated cash rate. In Los Angeles they hang out in public spaces in groups, often near hardware stores, to make themselves easy to find and hire.
Day laborers at Home Depot are generally undocumented immigrants who hang around in the parking lot hoping to get hired for quick handyman type jobs. This is why they've been a target for ICE raids
They are "day laborers." People who hang around there hoping to find work helping with your home repairs, painting, appliance installation, landscaping, or other projects etc.
Huh, and that works? Sounds a bit… old-fashioned? I’d think people are looking for these services online or in some gig work app. Interesting. Sounds unpleasant both for workers that have to hang around on the street, and customers that are approached (at least that’s how I imagine it) by people offering services even when they don’t need it. (Or do customers approach workers themselves?) From the outside, sounds weird. I wonder what in the US caused it.
They are mostly hired by the contractors who advertise their services online and through aps, who go to HD several times a day anyways. The final customer deals with the contractors, not with the day laborers.
At least at the Home Depot near me, the day laborers sit near the parking lot exits on the boulevard.
I go to Home Depot more than is reasonable, and I’ve never been approached by them. You typically would need to solicit them yourself. In general I find them to be respectful and pleasant - I imagine otherwise they would get customer complaints and Home Depot would have them trespassed immediately.
From others experiences I’ve talked to, they usually form “crews” with one main “crew chief” guy who speaks English you negotiate a rate and number of workers you need, and any specific skills like concrete, framing, etc. beyond simple labor. You generally are expected to provide any tools needed to complete the job beyond what fits in a standard tool belt.
> Huh, and that works? Sounds a bit… old-fashioned? I’d think people are looking for these services online or in some gig work app.
You need to go to the home improvement store to get materials for your job anyway, you can also pick up some people to help, too.
Why fuss on an app trying to figure out who to hire, when you can head over, say 'hey, who knows how to dig a foundation' or 'who can help me hang a door' or whatever your job is. Maybe find the worker first and they can help you shop for the stuff you need.
Drive them back to the lot at the end of the job.
>I’d think people are looking for these services online or in some gig work app.
Then you'd need to prove your identity and pay taxes on what you earn. This is for illegal immigrants working under the table.
It's also only in some areas. None of the big home improvement centers where I live have anyone hanging around looking for work.
I've seen it in Atlanta, GA, Phoenix, AZ, Kansas City, MO, Anchorage, AK, and Chicago, IL.
Small concrete / roofing company / construction company might need some more hands for a day or two for a project.
They go in to grab materials, leave with materials and some potentially new workers. If it works out (and it often does) they may use them for other projects, too.
Source: My father in law was a carpenter for about 40 years
It's very old-fashioned. Like Grapes of Wrath old-fashioned.
> wonder what in the US caused it
Lots of illegal immigrants desperate for work
Someone installed one of these at a shop in SFbay a couple years ago and I tracked it down, took an SPL recording snapshot, and emailed the city to report a violation of noise laws with the proof. The noisemaker was physically uninstalled after a few weeks and did not return. So, presumably Home Depot is violating LA Noise Ordinance, and could reasonably be expected to accrue fines or even forced to cease operating their retail business on that property, given a properly filed code violation report; and, since any persistent sound levels necessary to cause discomfort are almost certainly an OSHA violation, a side copy to the relevant Home Depot worker unions in LA/Cali/US might produce a rather significant result as well.
I guess the question is what the noise level is once off Home Depot property and whether the area is prohibited for their own workers
Doesn’t necessarily matter, unless Home Depot closes their property to the public and posts hearing safety devices warnings.
Home Depot making themselves less useful for their own customers. Galaxy brain.
For the apparenly many people who are baffled by this, it's not like this is some unrelated activity that Home Depot doesn't benefit from. It's super convenient to go pick up both the paint and the painters from the same place at the same time without even any planning. No emails or phone calles or coordinating schedules.
I've been battling noise at the workplace and in my neighborhood for decades. Some useful resources:
Noise Pollution Clearinghouse - https://nonoise.org/
Acoustilog Incorporated - https://acoustilog.com/ Of special note are the legal caveats one must consider to prevail in a lawsuit. (https://acoustilog.com/daniel.html) Consistent documentation is key.
Maine Code of Rules - Control of Noise https://www.law.cornell.edu/regulations/maine/06-096-C-M-R-c... Note document search terms "tonal" and "one-third octave".
Yeah, well I won't be going to Home Despot any longer.
I'd love to know the tech (and company) that provided the devices.
I don't know if the Home Depot in question is using The Mosquito, but it is a product that has been on the market for about 20 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito
What should Home Depot be doing? They don’t control the administration or the ICE raids. Forcing day laborers off the property ensures less raids happen on the property—I haven’t really understood the boycotts.
They don't have to set up Flock cameras and share the data with people who plan the ICE raids.
Home Depot's hands aren't totally clean here.
Home Depot put up the cameras to deal with organized crime, both theft and gift-card fraud. Flock specifically advertises that Home Depot put up the cameras to deal with gift card fraud:
> The Home Depot leveraged Flock Safety’s technology to close a case involving a multi-state gift card tampering ring, resulting in fraud and property theft charges exceeding $300,000. This type of success underscores how powerful connected data can be in mitigating fraud risks. [0]
Aside from that, Home Depot has been dealing with massive, multi-state, organized theft campaigns. Earlier this month, NY prosecutors lodged 780 counts of theft against thirteen suspects who stole millions of dollars of merchandise from Home Depot stores in nine states [1].
Not everything is about illegal immigrants.
[0] https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/combating-retail-fraud-with... [1] https://queenseagle.com/all/2025/12/12/retail-theft-ring-tha...
Last time I got 10 gauge conduit wiring it was literally padlocked and needed a manager to get because the theft issues are so bad.
Why not?
It is really no different than having drug dealers set up shop on your corner and sharing footage with police. You have people who are likely committing criminal activity (multiple crimes in the day laborer case) and are sharing footage with the relevant authorities.
The politicization of enforcement doesn’t change that as a business owner I would not want to own the location people facilitate illegal transactions.
> no different
In your world view immigrants working jobs you find beneath you is the same as someone selling drugs?
> likely committing criminal activity
You understand that exploiting day laborers to circumvent labor laws puts the, mostly civil though vanishingly rare criminal, liability on the employer rather than the employee, right?
We use laws rather than your own personal hatred of immigrants to define criminality.
I’ve done landscaping, home repair, fence construction, outdoor painting. My family still actively does. I don’t find them beneath me.
Working under the table without work authorization is actually spectacularly illegal as an employer and employee. Tax evasion is also spectacularly illegal as an individual.
What are you talking about?
Killing a comment that links to dot gov sources about undocumnteds' being protected, rather than prosecuted, by labor law and showing immigrants pay taxes is fascinating indeed.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/DIRNews/2025/2025-53.html
"The Labor Commissioner is reminding all workers that California’s labor laws protect every worker in the state, regardless of immigration status."
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
"A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund."
The reason it’s dead is these are completely irrelevant and you aren’t having a conversation, you’re taking a pulpit.
California does not dictate federal labor law and I’m sure that you already know that. Your arguments are bad and aggressive.
You’d have way more influence and agreement if you argued about immigration processes as a whole (“why are these people with jobs not given visas already?”) than these contrived obviously ridiculous and irrelevant excerpts.
You’re arguing with me like I won’t actually think about what you say, which is the “not the HN style” comment I gave you before. I will.
[dead]
You seem to not be reading anything I’m saying. I have family that works for legally operated blue collar businesses.
The difference is engaging in criminal activity.
Your arguments are spectacularly lazy so I’ll ask you to show me where people not authorized to work in the country have no legal liability if they choose to work in the country.
I don’t really know what’s ruffled your feathers so much here, but this isn’t really how HN operates. It seems like you got a bit flustered when the “you’re a bad rich person” argument didn’t work, and now you’re just flailing wildly.
[flagged]
You won’t answer the question because you can’t. Your links are irrelevant which is why your post is dead.
Unsure what question you are refering to.
Thanks for letting me know it was [dead].
Killing a comment that links to dot gov sources about undocumnteds' being protected, rather than prosecuted, by labor law and showing immigrants pay taxes is fascinating indeed.
https://www.dir.ca.gov/DIRNews/2025/2025-53.html
"The Labor Commissioner is reminding all workers that California’s labor laws protect every worker in the state, regardless of immigration status."
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU01/20250122/117827/HHRG...
"A new study shows that undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue in 2022 while many are shut out of the programs their taxes fund."
I always thought having day laborers chilling in Home Depot parking lots was a net positive thing for the store and a bit of an untapped potential. Companies pay a lot of money to insert themselves in the hiring stream, and here is Home Depot as the defacto meeting point for a substantial amount of economic activity. Surely a more intelligent and less frightened company could make something positive out of this.
But that's what you get with a fear-based political leadership. ICE targets day laborers not because of the horrible damage they do to the US economy, but because they have been selected as the scapegoats du jour.
How can an intelligent company make money from illegal activity in your opinion? Day laborers hang in the parking lot because they can't work legally, if they could then they could use HD's contractor portal and bid on jobs there.
Lobbying against the administration doing raids? It seems to me like every single part of this would hurt their business...
They put up deterrents for day-laborers who might otherwise shop for the projects they're getting hired for at home depot...
HD doesn't need anything more than asking people to leave their property. These folks generally are on a public sidewalk.
> What should Home Depot be doing?
Nothing? Why should they do anything?
Could there be a motif unrelated to ICE ? That Home Depot does not like that day labourers are loitering and approaching customers entering and leaving the store.
I believe Home Depot offers a similar service now so in a way they are directly competing
if so, you wouldn't expect this to be a new policy
Likely because they contrast with many of its own employees' lack of helpfulness, knowledge, or work ethic.
Whatever they should be doing, it mustn't make my ears ring when I go to their store. There is only one way to prevent this: Lowe's.
https://archive.ph/g16NX
I hired day laborers loitering outside HD before and got scammed.
This is why I don't hire them. I have nothing against their business model, but I'd expect I'd be the guy who gets unlucky and an illegal "gets hurt" (on purpose) then the court actually awards them a gazillion dollars when they claim I'm the evil unregulated employer smashing down the poor man with my lack of liability insurance and whatever long list of other things you need to hand someone else a dollar for a job.
[flagged]
I'm not aware of any democratic vote by the Native Americans to allow the Mayflower pilgrims to stay?
Not every society works off democracy. And the Mayflower pilgrims never joined the society of native Americans. The was a treaty between them, but it was broken by the native American side.
Home Depot isn't democratically elected, but you should sign up for survivor if you want to vote people out. Functioning democracies don't work that way.
All societies eject people who enter illegally.
Go cross illegally into Mexico and you can experience this.
The mundane activity of voting on rules to outline a formal legal process isn't what I'm talking about.
What I'm rejecting is the idea in the parent comment that democracies can vote directly on expelling entire classes of people. There's a long history of such political expulsions and none of them are periods to look back on fondly. The expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland killed tens of thousands, and the expulsions of native americans speak for themselves, as does the legacy of operation wetback.
And for what it's worth, I've had the distinct pleasure of being interrogated by the Mexican military at gunpoint while hiking because they thought I was a coyote. I've also been held in the small rooms on the US side. I'm extremely familiar with both sides of that particular border.
Immigration policy is one of the most important things that are voted on in functioning democracies.
>The noise is in earshot of IDEPSCA’s day laborer center
I find it misleading to add this line in the article without mentioning if the decibels exceed the applicable noise ordinances, or situation this is just people on HD's property complaining about the noise they are making on their own property. In that case people are free not to visit.
So if it's below the legal limit, people are not allowed to protest and/or complain about it?
It's their property so they should be able to do what they want with it. Stopping people from complaining is impossible. If you were to smash an iPhone someone would complain about how you wasted it or something, but ultimately it's up to the owner on how they want to handle their property.
I agree and believe we should boycott a company if we object to the choices they make with their property.