Thread: 54% of workers in NOLA are illegal and aren't leaving.

http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/waller101306.html

Spanish-Speakers Migrate to New Orleans

BY MARK WALLER
c.2006 Newhouse News Service

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NEW ORLEANS -- Daniel Flores, a native Honduran and newcomer to the New Orleans area, leaves the grousing about the pace of hurricane recovery to others. From his perspective, the post-Katrina saga is one of remarkable progress and considerable hope.

He was a teenager in Honduras when Hurricane Mitch devastated that country in 1998. He witnessed the destruction and joined his Boy Scout troop in helping to rescue people from inundated neighborhoods. Eight years later, survivors of Mitch still live in the streets in Honduras, he said.

"Here in New Orleans, it's been only one year, and look at this: The streets are fixed; people are rebuilding houses," said Flores, who was interviewed through a translator. "We're in America, and things work here. The government may be slow sometimes, but it works."

Flores, 25, arrived in the United States five years ago. In June, he moved here from North Carolina after hearing about jobs in the Hurricane Katrina recovery, and he found work painting houses. As proof of his optimism, he sent for his wife and daughter, who remained in North Carolina, and they joined him in July.

They represent a development that grows clearer as more time passes since Katrina: Some of the Hispanic people who streamed into the New Orleans area for work, at first joining what looked like a temporary surge of arrivals who would leave to chase the next storm, are finding more opportunity than despair in the recovery and they are choosing to stay. Meanwhile new additions to the area's Hispanic community -- from blue-collar laborers to contractors and small business owners -- continue to arrive.

A study by Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley found almost half the recovery construction work force in the New Orleans area to be Hispanic. And among workers who have been here at least six months, 65 percent reported they plan to settle here permanently. Most workers came from other states, not directly from their home countries.

For workers like Flores, who has a reliable job with a contractor and speaks some English, or those who are long established in the United States and can buy houses and bring their families, the prospect of sinking roots in the New Orleans area is within easy reach.

The day laborers who gather at corners, gas stations or home supply store parking lots waiting for contractors to arrive in trucks and take them to job sites face greater uncertainty. They wire money back home and might like to bring their families here, but doing so means overcoming considerable obstacles.

For the migrant laborers, more than half of whom are undocumented according to the Tulane-Berkeley study, the promise of plentiful and high-paying jobs doesn't translate into an easy life. They pack into small apartments, sleep on cots in a church shelter or become squatters in abandoned buildings. Contractors sometimes skip out on paying them. They have little access to health care if they get sick or injured. The specter of immigration enforcement is a constant threat.

A U.S. Census Bureau survey of hurricane-affected Gulf Coast communities suggested an influx of almost 100,000 Hispanics in the four months after Katrina. The survey also found a slight rise in Hispanics in New Orleans and surrounding parishes, to just above 6 percent.

"In some ways, New Orleans is just catching up with a trend that's happening in every other city in the country," said Elizabeth Fussell, a Tulane sociologist. "Katrina has put us on the national map."

Construction jobs are the primary mode of entry for immigrants throughout the country, Fussell said. New Orleans is suddenly producing a profusion of such jobs.

Like all aspects of the fluid and hard-to-measure post-storm population, definitive numbers are elusive, but the evidence that Hispanic laborers have become a fact of life at construction sites across the city is irrefutable.

Other sectors of the economy are also responding to the Hispanic wave, as attested by a demand for bilingual employees, said Darlene Kattan, executive director of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Louisiana. Spanish is appearing on more signs. Food markets and restaurants are adjusting their selections for a growing Hispanic clientele. Stores with money-wiring services bustle with immigrants sending earnings home to their families.
Almost all the advertisers are back on Spanish-speaking KGLA AM-1540, Radio Tropicale Caliente, and the area station is seeking to air more ads to reach a growing customer base, station owner Ernesto Schweikert said.

Other anecdotal evidence points to jumps in school enrollment of Hispanic students, attendance at churches that primarily serve Hispanics, and inquiries at Hispanic community resource centers about business counseling, English classes and other services.

"I will stay a long time, because right now I have work for five or 10 years," Daniel Flores said. "I like everything. I like the atmosphere. I like the city. I like it."

Flores said he enjoys fishing in Lake Pontchartrain and playing soccer in Lafreniere Park. He said his family, which previously lived in Hickory, N.C., near Charlotte, already has switched its football allegiance from the Carolina Panthers to the Saints.

He lives with his wife, Marisol Avila, and 7-year-old daughter, Katherine Avila, in a Metairie apartment. His wife also works in painting and other home restoration jobs. He said he is applying for permanent residency in the United States.

Despite his experience with Mitch in 1998, Flores said hurricanes don't worry him. He will evacuate with his family if one threatens. In a wealthy country like this, he said, he expects housing, levees and other infrastructure will be fixed eventually.

Others in the Hispanic influx share his optimism.

Jobs are so plentiful in the New Orleans area for Jose Echavarria's flooring, cabinets and countertops business that he decided several months into the Katrina aftermath to move here permanently from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. His wife and baby daughter came several months later in July. After renting a house, they bought one and moved in over Labor Day weekend.

Echavarria, 43, originally from the Dominican Republic, speaks fluent English, has lived in the United States for 20 years and became a citizen in 1990.

He and an employee recently laid bright new tile floors and installed fresh kitchen cabinets and countertops in a New Orleans house once spoiled by floodwater. The hollow houses and FEMA trailers in the neighborhood were testament to struggles that persist, but to Echavarria they were harbingers of a resurgence.

"There's so many people working and fixing houses, you know it's going to go back to normal," Echavarria said. "When all this is said and done, there will be more people living here than before, I believe."

Echavarria, his wife, Adriana, originally from Colombia, and their Florida-born 6-month-old, Isabella, lived mostly out of boxes and suitcases in a sparsely decorated rental house before moving to their new home in Kenner's Chateau Estates subdivision.

"What gives me confidence is that I'm behind about a month of work," Echavarria said. "There's nothing but more work coming all the time."

Flores and Echavarria said moving here also provides a greater sense of satisfaction and purpose in joining what they believe will be a momentous reconstruction.

"Helping people has given me a lot of pleasure," Echavarria said. "Putting someone in their home was a great feeling."

As he waited for jobs in a crowd of day laborers at the Lowe's Home Improvement store on Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans, Hugo Lima said he's staying because the pay is higher than he could make in Houston, where he was a lifelong resident before coming to New Orleans.

The store is such a hub that vendor trucks line the street, selling tacos and other Hispanic cuisine to the workers while they wait for contractors to pick them up. Gatherings of laborers making themselves available for hire, while unfamiliar to New Orleanians before Katrina, are a familiar sight in many parts of Latin America. Even skilled tradesmen -- plumbers, electricians and the like -- gather in public squares each morning, where those in need of their services know to find them. Lima, 50, said he routinely shows up at the Lowe's parking lot seeking construction jobs that pay about $150 a day.TAX FREE!!!

His wife and four children have followed him here from Houston. Lima said he expects to stay several years because the work opportunities seem limitless.
The Tulane-Berkeley study found 54 percent of the Hispanic workers surveyed were undocumented immigrants. The study said laborers in New Orleans often report poor health and safety conditions at work, substandard housing and getting stiffed on wages promised by employers. Undocumented workers are the most vulnerable, the researchers found.

High rents and housing shortages also create hardships for workers.

One group of Hispanic workers recently has been squatting in a vacant warehouse in Central City, cooking over open fires, washing clothes in buckets and sleeping on blankets and mattresses on the concrete.
The influx of Hispanic workers and their families gives New Orleans a growing stake in the national debate about immigration. Some argue laws must be enforced to expel workers; others say the workers fill urgent needs and should be better accommodated.

A study by the Advancement Project, an advocacy group in Washington, calls for federal agencies, state and local governments to better monitor their treatment.

"They all are trying to make a better life for themselves and are finding anything but that," said Judith Browne-Dianis, co-director of the group. "While we're trying to rebuild the city, we have a lack of government infrastructure to make sure there's a just reconstruction."

Temple Black, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman, said 400 to 500 undocumented immigrants have been picked up since February. He said the agency focuses on calls about large gatherings or disturbances from local law enforcement and primarily looks for illegal immigrants with criminal histories.

"We have to prioritize the assets that we have," Black said.

Oct. 13, 2006

(Mark Waller is a staff writer for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. He can be contacted at mwaller@timespicayune.com. Vivian Hernandez and Manuel Torres assisted as translators.)

I can see the writing on the wall, New Orleans is destined to become another Los Angeles.

I hate it for NO but at least there are three less illegals in NC.

Why don't they just do what they're supposed to do with the farm workers, and see to it that they go back to their own countries when the work is done? Too simple?

I wish they cared as much about the natives. SAD...

And I suppose Jesse Jackson is all for this.

Tim Binh wrote:

And I suppose Jesse Jackson is all for this.

I don't know his feeling on the blacks being replaced in the New Orleans work force, but he is certainly a supporter of amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Hubby, was sent there last year with the National Guard....he said they had t-shirts on saying, "We are here and we aren't leaving".

He said there was always someone with them to make sure they were doing the work.

I do not know who that "someone" was, but it wasn't a guard member.

And, when hubby returned, he and his whole troop was sick, I got it too, it was the worst case of flu, a cold or pneumonia I have ever had, and ended up with scarred lungs!

Now Dr. says I have to quit smoking.......I can't!!!!! SO HARD!