Turning a bad thing good

Lawrence Downes has an editorial in The New York Times about an experiment that worked:

The seaside town of Jupiter, Florida has lots of immigrant day laborers, which makes it scarcely different from hundreds of towns across the country. Men started showing up on street corners there a few years ago, taking manual jobs in construction, landscaping and carpentry. It was— in the boom years, anyway— a good match of labor demand and supply.
The changes brought consternation, too, as groups of men turned quiet sidewalks into traffic-snarling hiring bazaars. Residents complained and anti-immigrant anger grew. It’s an old script, but here is where Jupiter gets extraordinary. In 2006, workers and residents banded together, with the town’s help, to create a hiring site. It brought both order to the streets and immigrant families into the community.
The site, run by nonprofit groups in a building leased from the town, offers job referrals. But it also offers job training, counseling, language and sewing classes, health services and a food pantry. Eighteen workers recently volunteered to build a playground outside the police department in West Palm Beach. They call the center El Sol, not just for the sun, but for the man who helped create it, Sol Silverman.
Jupiter has now also set up a sister-city relationship with Jacaltenango, Guatemala, the little Mayan village where so many of its newest residents were born.
Hiring sites like Jupiter’s are not going to fix America’s ramshackle immigration system. A recent documentary about Jupiter and Jacaltenango, Brother Towns, shows the pain and damage of a labor market fueled by desperation: the perils of the desert crossing, the women whose husbands return home in coffins, the children who grow up recognizing their fathers only as a photo and a voice over the phone.
But it would be foolish to think immigrant labor can be wished or persecuted away. It is the wise community that resolves to do what it can to help day laborers— and itself— instead of waiting for the great solution that hasn’t arrived.
Nobody has the one big immigration answer. But Jupiter has an answer, one that supplies more order, lawfulness and compassion than all the screaming in so many other cities across the country.