http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/ne ... 887497.htm

Posted on Thu, Oct. 13, 2005

KATRINA RECOVERY

Immigrants flock to Gulf Coast for jobs

The cleanup and reconstruction of the Gulf Coast are attracting millions of undocumented immigrants, who are seeking high-wage jobs without fear of dodging immigration officials.

BY JAY ROOT AND AARON C. DAVIS

Knight Ridder News Service


NEW ORLEANS - A few weeks ago, Luis Diaz was wearing himself out for $5 an hour in the tobacco fields of North Carolina. Then Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.

Now Diaz, like many undocumented Hispanic immigrants, has landed a piece of the largest demolition and reconstruction project in modern U.S. history at double his usual salary, plus meals and lodging.

While critics complain that his job should go to local workers or those displaced by the hurricane, Diaz is making plans to stay as long as the work lasts or until La Migra -- U.S. immigration -- starts cracking down.

''Maybe they will come and make us leave,'' said Diaz, who came to United States from Veracruz, Mexico, about nine months ago. ``But if they do, well, there's nothing you can do about it.''

Welcome to the Gulf Coast post-Katrina, the nation's latest immigration magnet.

Lured here by the promise of fat paychecks and an emergency federal decree temporarily suspending immigration-enforcement sanctions, they sleep in tents, crowded hotel rooms and sometimes even in parking lots. They're hauling trash and cutting trees, fastening tarps to damaged roofs and tearing out wet Sheetrock from thousands of soaked buildings.

It started out as a trickle. But over time, Hurricane Katrina has unleashed a flood of immigrants -- some legal, some not -- into New Orleans and other coastal communities from Florida, Texas, California, North Carolina and other immigrant-rich states.

Many are natives of Mexico or Central America, but some come from as far away as Brazil. Hundreds of Hispanic immigrants could be found last week crammed into the Best Western in downtown New Orleans, where LVI Services, an environmental remediation company based in New York, was packing them in three and four to a room.

Hundreds more LVI workers were staying at a Shoney's Inn in nearby Metairie, said company representatives in New Orleans, who didn't want to be identified for fear of losing their jobs for talking to reporters. Calls placed to LVI weren't returned.

COMPLAINTS

Already, critics are complaining that local residents are losing work to cheaper, imported labor, even as immigrant advocates say the foreign workers themselves are being exploited.

At a recent seminar about the rebuilding efforts, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin asked the crowd: ``How do I ensure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?''

In one case last week, 75 union electricians held a news conference to show off their termination letters from a job site at the Louisiana National Guard's Naval Air Station in Belle Chasse, south of downtown New Orleans. They said a contractor had sent 120 immigrant workers from Houston to replace them. A spokesman for the Louisiana National Guard, Neal Martin, said he hadn't heard of any such incident.

Gary Warren, the political director for the Louisiana Regional Carpenters Council, said his group had begun receiving complaints from union members who'd been laid off by contractors and replaced with immigrants. 'Nobody wants me to say this because it's not politically correct, but they are calling them `Texans.' What they are really using is a lot of illegal labor,'' he said. ``It's an issue of people who lost everything being laid off in favor of people from out of state.''

Life isn't always rosy for the immigrants, either. Twice in recent weeks, local police, backed by federal officers, have rounded up Hispanic-looking men at Red Cross shelters in Mississippi and questioned whether they were hurricane victims or just helping themselves to free shelter and food.

Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, said many Hispanic workers, besides being threatened with deportation, had become Katrina victims of another sort: left helpless after the allure of good wages and shelter vanished in a haze of broken promises from unscrupulous contractors.

He said his group found 20 to 30 workers, employed by a cleaning crew, sleeping on the floor in trailers with no food or electricity.

LITTLE TO FEAR

Employers have little to fear in hiring illegal workers. Even before Katrina hit, work-site immigration enforcement was lagging.

A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office in August found that the number of fines issued to employers for knowingly hiring illegal workers has plummeted, from 417 in 1999 to just three last year. Arrests of unauthorized workers dropped 84 percent from 1999 to 2003, the report found.

On Sept. 6, the Department of Homeland Security said it would ``refrain from initiating employer-sanction enforcement action for the next 45 days for civil violations . . . with regards to individuals who are currently unable to provide identity and eligibility documents.''