On weekday mornings, as you drive on Route 59 into this weather-beaten working-class village with its crazy-quilt population of African-Americans, Caribbeans, Latin Americans and Orthodox Jews, you’ll commonly see roadside clusters of immigrant men, all of them Hispanic, waiting to be picked up for day labor jobs.

Outside the Shell Supervalue Car Wash and gas station, the immigrants have a gentle foil in the person of Eddi Duckworth, a 45-year-old woman from nearby — but wealthier — Nyack.

Every morning, wearing a black T-shirt that reads “Security” in bold capital letters, Ms. Duckworth drives her red Volvo to the Shell station, which pays her to keep passers-by from hiring the laborers on its property. Ms. Duckworth politely tells the drivers of idling vans seeking cheap help with landscaping or construction that they must engage the men from the roadside.

“I want them to be able to work,” she said Friday morning, gesturing to a group of about six Latin American men with whom she seems to have developed a warm rapport despite the language barrier. “They just can’t do it here.”

Illegal immigrants constitute a large, if undetermined, portion of Spring Valley’s population, estimated in 2003 at 23,000 by the United States census.

Federal law, in addition to banning the hiring of illegal immigrants, makes it a crime for any person or business to assist such hiring — for example, by providing space for day laborers to gather while waiting for jobs. But Ms. Duckworth said the Shell owners were more concerned about complaints that female customers were intimidated by the sight of the workers and staying away.

The other day, that law ensnared Spring Valley’s mayor, a Mississippi-born man named George O. Darden.

The local paper, The Journal News, quoted an illegal immigrant as saying that the mayor had personally hired him and a group of fellow workers for a municipal job, cleaning out a dilapidated building for demolition. The job was part of the village’s much-touted revitalization of North Main Street, its principal thoroughfare.

Moreover, the mayor had paid the men $10 an hour, roughly a quarter of what nonunion workers should receive for such work under state law, according to State Labor Department officials.

On Friday, the mayor agreed to pay 10 of the laborers the $30-an-hour difference for their work, according to a spokeswoman for the state agency.

Michael E. Bongiorno, the Rockland County district attorney, said state officials told him that they would merely censure Mr. Darden, because the underpayment seemed to be a first-time offense and because the state does not bar the hiring of illegal workers.

Mr. Darden would not comment, hanging up the phone when reached at home Friday morning and refusing an interview when approached later at his office.

Instead, a member of the mayor’s staff furnished a copy of a statement Mr. Darden had read at a press conference the day before. In it, he denied that he “intentionally and knowingly hired undocumented workers on a public works project.”

But Mr. Darden, who is black, also invoked his family’s roots in the segregated South, saying, “I know what it means to be poor and out of work,” and telling newcomers to Spring Valley, “the door is as open to your dreams today as it was to mine when I moved here more than four decades ago.”

On the federal level, however, The Journal News reported Friday that the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York had referred the case to national immigration control officials. Asked to confirm that, a representative of the United States attorney said it was the office’s policy to neither confirm nor deny the existence of federal investigations.

Throughout the village on Friday, opinion on the mayor’s actions seemed divided, and many people were hesitant to speak on the record.

Michael, a 35-year-old man who lives and works in Spring Valley and declined to give his last name, said the men the mayor had hired need to survive. “But if they get hurt on the job,” he said, “what recourse do they have?” Of the mayor, he said, “I think he should be fined, big time.”

Idling her car in the parking lot of the North Main Street strip mall that houses the mayor’s offices as well as those of several social service groups, Sandra Oates, who is working on a domestic violence project for the village, defended Mr. Darden. “I think he wants to do what’s best for the village,” she said. “If they’d had no work, they would have been making zero.”

Down the road, the Humanitarian Project for Day Laborers, which is housed in an Episcopal church and provides immigrant workers with English classes and other support services, was closed for July. John Sagala, an owner of the funeral home across the street, said the Hispanic immigrant population was “a vital part of landscaping and snow removal” in the village.

Few illegal immigrants who were approached on Friday said they knew of the mayor’s misstep. Nearly all mentioned the extraordinary difficulty of finding work — even house-cleaning work that might pay as little as $6 an hour — without legal papers.

And at Tienda Mexicana, a humble store on North Main Street that sells Mexican DVDs alongside cooking staples like avocados and queso blanco, the owner, Victoria Ventura, 54, who said she was arranging her legal papers with lawyers, insisted that even low wages like that were better than the $5 a day on which many people must subsist in her native Mexico City.

“Here there’s food and schools for our children,” said Ms. Ventura, a mother of four. “Thank God it’s better in this country.”