On Staten Island, the wait list for day laborers seeking free health and safety training for construction jobs is hundreds of names long. Worker centers in Queens and Brooklyn are seeing three to five times the demand for scarce training slots, far exceeding availability.

The backup for safety courses is adding yet another hurdle for recent South American immigrants, many of whom have never worked on a construction site before, striving to build lives in the city while awaiting hearings on asylum applications.

By law, laborers can’t show up at a construction site without 30 hours of training and a card certifying completion of what are known as OSHA-30 and OSHA-10 courses. For thousands who arrived this year from the Mexico border, training delays mean that on-the-books jobs will remain out of reach even after they wait the legally required 180 days for a U.S. work permit.

“Our capacity is at its limit,” said Ligia Guallpa, executive director of Workers Justice Project, a Brooklyn-based center. “We can only do two classes a month.”

Among the 25 trainees at the headquarters of Staten Island workers center La Colmena on a recent Sunday sat a new arrival from Venezuela who asked that he be identified by his first name, Ronald. He’s a college graduate and data analyst who arrived with his wife and daughter at Port Authority Bus terminal by way of El Paso, Texas.

He is among more than 23,000 asylum seekers who city officials estimate have arrived from the border since April,...

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