Rafael Sanchez will earn $15,000 this year as a temporary worker. It's not exactly the version of the American Dream he envisioned when he illegally crossed the border 15 years ago. Watch video
This story is part of "The invisible workforce," an NJ Advance Media special report on New Jersey's temp industry.
NEW BRUNSWICK -- Sitting on his bed in the windowless garage that serves as his home, Rafael Sanchez says he's not sure how much longer he can work.
After years of manual labor, the 65-year-old native of Mexico says he is slowing down.
Sanchez has spent the past few years living in this cramped 9-by-14-foot room -- the detached garage of an old house on a littered dead-end street near the NJ Transit train tracks. He pays $320 a month in rent for the unheated space lit with a series of extension cords.
Invisible workforce: Inside N.J.'s temp industry
He spends his days at a factory near Trenton, standing for hours on a fast-moving assembly line.
If he's lucky, he will earn $15,000 this year.
As a temporary worker, he constantly worries he will lose his job.
Rafael Sanchez, a temp worker from Mexico, came to the U.S. illegally in 2001. He lives inside a small room built inside a garage on a dead end street in New Brunswick. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) It's not exactly the version of the American dream Sanchez says he envisioned when a "coyote" back in Mexico City offered to smuggle him across the border for $2,400 and bring him to New Brunswick. There, he was told, work was plentiful for new immigrants -- even those entering the country illegally.
Fifteen years later, Sanchez is still trying to eke out a living.
"I have nothing to hide. I recognize that I am illegal," Sanchez says in Spanish. "Those of us who are ilegales ... have restrictions on everything."
Those restrictions include finding permanent work.
Sanchez is among a growing army of workers employed by temporary agencies in New Jersey. Workers and activists say temp agencies in New Brunswick, Elizabeth, Union City and other municipalities are booming.
Many agencies set up storefront shops in Hispanic neighborhoods and hire large numbers of new immigrants and workers living in the country illegally, activists and workers say.
The workers, including Sanchez, are sent to low-paying jobs in warehouses and factories clustered along the New Jersey Turnpike in Central and North Jersey.
Some complain they face racial and sexual discrimination, unsafe working conditions, unpaid overtime and other alleged mistreatment. Because many are new or unauthorized immigrants, the temps are often afraid to report mistreatment to authorities or tell their stories, advocates say.
Rafael Sanchez, an unauthorized immigrant temp worker from Mexico, makes his daily walk from his home to a temp agency in New Brunswick before dawn. He takes a van to his $10-an-hour temp job in a factory near Trenton. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) Now a member of the worker activist group New Labor, Sanchez agreed to allow NJ Advance Media to use his name and share his story to help shed light on the growing temporary employment agency industry in New Jersey.
"My voice is the voice of all the immigrants who come here illegally," Sanchez says.
He pulls out a pile of pay stubs from his temp agency. A recent stub says Sanchez earns $10 an hour, or $400 a week in gross pay. Then come the deductions: for federal income tax ($7.98), Social Security ($24.80), Medicare ($5.80), state taxes and deductions ($8.24) and for the temp agency's medical insurance plan ($12.69).
Another $45 a week is taken directly out of his paycheck by the agency for the van that transports the workers.
Sanchez's final paycheck is $295.49 for the week. If the temp work stays steady, he will make between $14,000 and $15,000 a year.
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Some of the money taken out of his check for taxes, Medicare and Social Security represents cash and benefits he likely will never see. His Social Security number is either fake or stolen -- he is not sure which -- so he will never be able to retire with a Social Security check.
"I get none of the benefits," Sanchez says.
However, he recently began filing income tax returns each year with the IRS, using the Individual Tax Identification Number system set up for unauthorized immigrants, in hopes that he will someday obtain legal status.
Sanchez has documents showing that his federal taxes are up to date for each year he has been in the U.S. He paid off $1,800 in back taxes he owed several years ago. This year, he got a $400 refund.
Sanchez says his path to becoming a temp worker began in 2001 when he got into a smuggler's van in Mexico.
At the time, Sanchez, the son of a farm worker, had a job in Mexico City as a machine operator in a plastic-packaging factory. Each weekend he made the two-hour commute home to his wife and six sons in Tlaxcala, a state in central Mexico.
Rafael Sanchez, a temp worker living in New Brunswick, shows his hands. At age 65, Sanchez buys his own gloves and safety glasses to work in a $10-an-hour temp job in a factory near Trenton. (Andre Malok | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com) But he was frustrated by the low pay in the factory and felt pressure to earn more to support his family -- especially his then-6-year-old son, who had mental and physical disabilities and needed constant care.
Sanchez says a friend in Mexico City told him about easy work in New Jersey.
"He started to tell me, 'You should come! You should come!' " Sanchez says.
Eventually, Sanchez agreed. At age 50, he took a chance on a better life as a temp worker in New Jersey.
With the help of a "coyote" or smuggler, Sanchez joined a group that drove to Sasabe, a town on the Mexico-Arizona border with a vast stretch of uninhabited desert known as a staging area for illegal immigration and drug smuggling into the U.S.
After their van broke down, the group walked in the dark through an unguarded section of the border and into Arizona. They walked all night and ended up near Tucson, where they spent several weeks waiting for their smuggler to secure a new van to take them to Los Angeles.
The group spent a few days in California before they were loaded into a third van that took them to their final destination: New Brunswick.
"As soon as I arrived, I didn't know anything," Sanchez says. "I didn't even know how to find a job. The people who helped me come here, they gave me a place to stay. They took me to the agencies."
He filled out an application at one of the numerous New Brunswick temp agencies lining French Street. He used his own name and a Social Security number supplied by his coyote. He was surprised he needed a number.
"No one tells us the requirements one should have in order to get a job. No one ever talked about the 'Socials,'" he says.
Sanchez says he was unsure if the Social Security number he was given -- and still uses -- was stolen, fake or belonged to a dead person.
In the end, it didn't matter.
No one at the now-defunct agency questioned his immigration status, and he quickly got a temp job unloading boxes at a local clothing warehouse, he says.
A temp agency van took him back and forth to the job, so he had no need for a car or a driver's license. The warehouse was filled with other Spanish-speaking temp workers and new immigrants, so there was no need to learn English.
Though the pay was lower than expected, Sanchez says he was able to slowly pay the $2,400 he owed his smuggler.
"Fortunately, it took me only eight months," he says.
Life working for the agency during his first year in New Jersey was difficult. Temp work offers no sick days, vacations or paid holidays. His assignment could end at any moment without explanation.
He left the agency after a few months and used his illegally obtained Social Security number to move to a permanent job at a factory.
That job ended abruptly after six years when a new owner bought the factory and changed personnel in 2007.
"(The new owner) didn't want illegals anymore. He let go of about 380 people. The manager said he was happy with our work, but the new owner didn't want this situation," Sanchez says.
So Sanchez went back to the temp agencies.
After hearing about plentiful work on horse ranches in Kentucky, he made his way there in 2008. But he was able to find only exhausting work harvesting tobacco, making $8 an hour and 10 cents for every bundle he brought in from the fields.
Realizing he had made a mistake, Sanchez gave up on Kentucky after less than three months and paid someone $500 to take him back to New Brunswick.
Sanchez found himself back at the New Brunswick temp agencies. After a series of warehouse jobs, he landed a long-term temp assignment on an assembly line in the factory near Trenton where he has worked the past six years.
Sitting in the garage that serves as his home, the soft-spoken Sanchez says his hands and eyes are still healthy, thanks to the work gloves and safety glasses he buys himself. He says neither his factory nor his temp agency supplies any safety equipment.
Standing 5 foot 4 with a thin frame, Sanchez says he is suffering from Addison's disease, an adrenal gland disorder that can cause extreme fatigue and weight loss. His family mails him his medication from Mexico, where the drugs are cheaper.
He lives in the cluttered garage with his possessions piled against the door. He sleeps on a bed under a painting of the Last Supper and other religious artifacts he keeps to remember his family.
Though his landlord lets him use the bathroom and kitchen in the main house, he eats most of his meals on his bed. He has a mini refrigerator and microwave hooked up to a series of extension cords strung across the garage room.
In his free time, he watches "Learn to Speak English" VHS tapes on the television at the foot of his bed. He spends his evenings attending meetings and events as a member of New Labor, Unity Square and other New Brunswick activist groups working to help immigrants.
He calls or texts his wife of nearly 40 years, Pilar, every week or so using his $20-a-month flip-style cellphone. He also wires about $63 or $64 a week -- about a fifth of his take-home pay -- back to Mexico, according to his receipts.
"Why am I still here?" Sanchez says. "With me being here, my kids won't find themselves needing to come here illegally. ... Even though they've wanted to come here, I have tried to keep them from coming, helping them financially as much as I can."
One of his six sons followed him to the U.S. in 2004, illegally crossing the border with the help of a coyote. Sanchez says his son, now 29, found work in a restaurant and lives in Hillsborough.
Temp work, though low-paying, is still more lucrative than anything he could find in Mexico, the elder Sanchez says. He sends home as much money as he can each week, especially for his wife and his disabled son, who is now 21.
He says he hopes the little money he sends to his other four adult sons keeps them from being tempted to become either sellers or buyers in the lucrative drug trade in his hometown of Calpulalpan, a small city of 33,000 people.
Sanchez is active in the workers' rights movement, led by the local activist groups New Labor and Unity Square, which helped introduce a sick-pay ordinance in New Brunswick last year that guarantees some temp workers up to three days' sick pay a year.
It is a small step, he says, toward better conditions.
Like many immigrants living in the country illegally, Sanchez says he hopes the small steps lead to something bigger. His ultimate hope is immigration reform that allows him to become a legal worker who can travel back and forth across the border to see his family.
"This country, even though we don't have legal residency here, has been a good country to us," Sanchez says. "And it doesn't matter if I stay here a long time or a shorter period, I will always be grateful to this country and its people."
Kelly Heyboer may be reached at kheyboer@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KellyHeyboer. Find her at KellyHeyboerReporter on Facebook.
Enrique Lavin may be reached at elavin@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @enriquelavin.