Thread: Immigrants flock to Gulf Coast for jobs

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.''

www.washingtonpost.com

Small Businesses Lose Katrina Cleanup Contracts to Large Firms

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 7, 2005; A08

When Al Knight received notice Friday that his small company's contract to help wire Louisiana's storm-damaged Alvin Callendar Naval Air Station had been abruptly canceled, he could not have known the reverberations would reach Washington within days.

But the plight of little Knight Enterprises LLP has several compelling factors: a minority-owned small business in New Orleans losing out to a big, national firm; local workers, mainly African American, first devastated by Hurricane Katrina and then supplanted by out-of-state, low-wage replacements; questions over White House wage policies; and a name that has haunted the Bush administration since the invasion of Iraq -- Halliburton.

Little wonder that Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) highlighted it yesterday as he grilled the Federal Emergency Management Agency's acting director, R. David Paulison, on the Bush administration's hurricane recovery contracts.

After Katrina hit, most of Knight's electricians found themselves with nothing: homeless, jobless and broke. But when Alabama-based BE&K landed a subcontract to help rebuild the naval air station, it turned to Knight for electricians -- he says 75, BE&K says 59 at the peak of work.

BE&K was working for Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., Vice President Cheney's former company.

When BE&K came to him, Knight said he was told his work would run well into the millions of dollars and stretch out as long as 20 months. His men would be paid the prevailing union wage of $22.09 an hour, plus health benefits.

After three weeks, the initial work was 60 percent completed. Then, on Friday, Knight received a letter informing him that BE&K workers -- largely from out of state and, according to Knight, earning $14 to $15 an hour without benefits -- could take over from there.

Susan Wasley, a BE&K spokeswoman, said Knight's crew was always there merely to augment the company's own staff of 45 electricians. Knight Enterprises was let go because its work was done.

Knight did not blame BE&K for his disappointment. Instead, he pointed to President Bush's decision last month to suspend the so-called Davis-Bacon federal law that mandates that workers on federal projects be paid the average wage of an area, often the union wage. Once BE&K was forced to compete with nonunion companies for KBR contracts, they could not afford the union electricians that dominate Louisiana, he said.

"I can tell you this for sure," Knight said. "If Davis-Bacon wage rates were left alone, then you'd have local Louisiana people working on local projects, and we would be working today."

http://www.2theadvocate.com/stories/100 ... g001.shtml

Lawmakers targeting 'carpetbag' politicians


By JESSICA FENDER
jfender@theadvocate.com
Capitol news bureau

"Carpetbagger" politicians trying to enrich themselves and their buddies are hindering efforts to secure jobs for displaced New Orleans residents who want to rebuild their hurricane-devastated city, two lawmakers said Tuesday.
State Rep. Warren Triche, D-Thibodaux, said former elected officials -- he called them "new-day carpetbaggers" -- are hanging around the State Capitol trying to scoop up as much federal money as possible.

"I've seen firsthand how these cronies and these opportunists come knocking on the door every time there's the smell of new blood in the form of monies to be had," Triche said.

"You got these people who are going to come and take care of their own rather than the general welfare of their constituencies," Triche said.

Rep. Juan LaFonta, D-New Orleans, said a lot of handwringing and lip service has been given to the problem of employing evacuees.

What's missing is a unified effort to put legislative pressure on five major contract holders to hire Louisianans, he said.

"I'm really tired of meeting with different commissions when what we have is a lack of action," LaFonta said following a labor union press conference.

Before many local leaders realized it, officials at the federal level awarded five major no-bid contracts to large companies, only one of which is based in Louisiana, he said.

These corporations have their own set of subcontractors they work with and have largely frozen out native Louisianans as streets are cleaned, electrical wiring is repaired and structures restored, many complain.

Many of the subcontractors favor cheap, outside labor, LaFonta said.

"I was down there. It was like a Latin American country; everybody was speaking Spanish," LaFonta said.

Instead of banding together to confront the issue, individual lawmakers are busy trying to finagle deals that help companies they're friendly with, LaFonta said.

He didn't name names.

Calls by state Treasurer John Kennedy to blacklist companies owned by public officials or their families from taking on reconstruction work have met with mixed reactions from legislators.

LaFonta's comments came at a press conference announcing a coalition of labor unions and other community organizations aimed at getting skilled jobs for evacuees and at reinstating a piece of federal legislation that ensures workers are paid a prevailing wage.

The new organization unites local branches of the Service Employees International Union, the AFL-CIO, Acorn, the NAACP and other community groups.

Members of the coalition, dubbed New Opportunities for Action and Hope, pointed to housing as a critical need for displaced residents looking for rebuilding jobs.

Robert "Tiger" Hammond, president of the New Orleans AFL-CIO, related a recent experience when his union electricians were sent home from a job at the Belle Chasse Air Force Base to make room for laborers from Texas. All of his 75 electricians were Louisianans, and many from New Orleans, Hammond said.

Another major focus of the group is restoring the Davis-Bacon Act, which President Bush repealed Sept. 8.

The law guaranteed government contractors pay workers the prevailing wage for their services, but the president said at the time it was important to cut construction costs in a natural disaster.

Under Davis-Bacon, for example, an electrician is guaranteed $22-an-hour plus benefits. A roofer is guaranteed $12.28 hourly.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco on Friday sent Bush a letter asking him to consider putting the wage rule back in place.

"Our workers are performing their same functions for far less money at a time when they are in desperate need of adequate wages," her letter states.

"Our own companies are losing contracts when they are competing against outside companies who are taking advantage of your order by paying incredibly low wages and bringing in workers from elsewhere," she wrote.

Arrest all of the illegals, fine the employers and make it law that the government cannot hand out no-bid contracts and we will have our country back. These business people who are traitors will then be forced to pay a higher wage to workers--American citizens who are out of work. This is long overdue, due to the fact that these jobs (Americans can't afford to do, not because they won't) have not paid a decent wage since Ronnie proposed to private businesses to pass costs onto the consumer. Ever since then, the cost of living has out raced wages earned. Problem is, American business does not want to pay what jobs really should pay. I say:

IF YOU CANT PAY THE PREVAILING WAGE, YOU SHOULDN'T BE IN BUSINESS, you bottom feeder.

<img src=http://www.mollysatthemarket.net/photo_gallery/lafonta_gallery/thumbnails/IMG_4502.jpg>
Juan A. LaFonta



It is nice to see a politician who remembers the interests of the people who elected him and when it is an American Latino with a mixed district doubly so.



LaFonta could have taken the side of the groups that call for citizens rights for the ilegal aliens. Instead he is calling for Louisiana jobs for Louisiana's own citizens.