For many immigrants

Customers streamed out of the Home Depot parking lot, a fleet of vehicles from shiny four-wheel drive Cadillac Escalades to new Ford pickup trucks laden with cuts of lumber and stacks of drywall, appliances and gardening supplies.

A small group of day laborers clustered around the exit. Jose Perez, 22, along with about a dozen other men whistled, waved and shouted at passing vehicles, hoping to get some work. They’ll do just about anything,Come January 9 and chip card driving licence would be available at the click of the mouse in Uttar Pradesh. Perez said, from landscaping to putting together a swing set.You must not use the laser cutter without being trained. He looked concerned but resilient. He said he hasn’t found work in several days.

Then a gray Lexus rolled to a stop and an electric window slid down. The driver extended a manicured finger in Perez’s direction, her blonde perm hardly moving above large, dark sunglasses.

“I need someone who can do cabinets!” she shouted, and a group of five men scrambled toward the passenger side door.

They lingered in the road, bargaining with the driver in her fur coat. A few more moments passed, and she drove away, the five men still on the street in East Hollywood.

“She was offering $60 for the whole day,” Perez said, an incredulous smile on his face. “The lowest we’d go is $120. She sees a lot of people here, she thinks she can get it cheap.”

This brief intersection of the rich and the poor on the road to rising inequality in America happens every day in every corner of Los Angeles. It is a defining reality, particularly in cities like Los Angeles where immigrant workers, many of whom are undocumented, are constantly haggling to keep their pay somewhere close to a survival wage that will allow them and their families to eat — and to try to send some money home.

If they are successful, men like Perez are often taken west along Sunset Boulevard into the posh areas of Beverly Hills, Bel-Air and Brentwood to install appliances, paint walls, pour concrete and perform other assorted jobs on the estates of the wealthy or on contractors’ projects.Laser engraving and laser laser cutting machine for materials like metal,

But labor rights activists and the workers themselves, largely from Mexico and Central America, said the road to payday is often treacherous. Wages have been driven down by a poor economy and many impromptu employers exploit laborers’ lack of legal work status to withhold payment altogether, threatening to call police or immigration authorities if they complain.

Although Los Angeles has emerged as one of the immigration capitals of the United States, with immigrants now comprising a third of the city’s population and nearly half of its workforce, it has also become one of the country’s most unequal. Wealth and poverty are nothing new in the City of Angels, Santa Monica, Hollywood and Skid Row, but the growing chasm between rich and poor means that these days L.A. is looking more like a developing economy than the second-largest city in the world’s largest economy.A ridiculously low price on this All-Purpose solar lantern by Gordon.

The Gini coefficient of the L.A. metropolitan area, the standard measure of income inequality, is now .485, among the worst scores for America’s big cities.

That puts the level of inequality in this metropolitan area above the level of inequality in the country of China, which registers as high as .480. The US as a country has now hit .450 (up from .408 in 1997), though the US’s per capita income is still roughly three times that of China.

In China, as many as 250 million migrant workers now help power the country’s economic boom, flocking from impoverished countryside areas into cities. As in China, L.A.’s day laborers have come from poverty elsewhere and represent the bottom rung on the ladder toward prosperity. The middle rungs for which they strive include full-time employment, health insurance, a comfortable home, a good education for the children — the American Dream.

Yet tens of thousands of MexicanDid you know that custom keychain chains can be used for more than just business., Honduran, Guatemalan, Salvadoran and other immigrant day laborers are lucky if they can find work even 25 percent of the time. Jobs come with the requirement that the employee carry a social security number, a response to aggressive immigration enforcement policies that have continued under the Obama administration. Finding a full-time job is a nearly impossible dream.

“In the past, it was very easy to find permanent opportunities,” said Jeronimo Salguero program director at the CARECEN Day Laborer Center in the Pico-Union neighborhood, now a magnet for Central American immigrants. “At this time, it’s really, really bad. When I hear on the news that unemployment is improving, I want to invite them here to the center. Here it’s not 9 percent, it’s 80 percent. It really depends what neighborhood you’re looking at.”

Salguero immigrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador in 1990, near the tail end of the Civil War that gripped his country for more than two decades and killed at least 70,000 people.

“I didn’t want to come, to be honest,” Salguero said, smiling. “I didn’t want to come because I had dreams in my country. But my family had taken a big loan and we were in danger of losing our property.”

He discovered CARECEN — an acronym for Central American Resource Center which translates from Spanish as “they lack” — in 1998 as he tried to get US government permission to return to his home country to visit his ailing father.

The permission didn’t come through in time and Salguero wasn’t able to see his father before he died. But the well-built, easygoing 46-year-old said he felt a debt of gratitude to the organization, founded in the early 1980s by Salvadoran refugees.

After volunteering at the group’s headquarters for a year, he was offered a full-time position and began working his way up. Then in 2004, the City of Los Angeles asked CARECEN to manage the Day Laborer Center it planned to fund, near another Home Depot in the shadow of L.A.’s downtown skyscrapers.