Thread: From the pages of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans

Migrants Find a Gold Rush in New Orleans
Word spread to Latino laborers as Katrina’s floodwaters ebbed: There is work with good money and no questions about papers.
By Sam Quinones, Times Staff Writer
April 4, 2006
NEW ORLEANS ? As the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina receded in September, roads filled with residents leaving the city, their cars, SUVs and moving vans jammed with what they had salvaged of their lives.

But another mass movement was taking place on the other sides of the highways.
Thousands of men from Mexico and Central America were driving into the city. Word had spread throughout the Latino immigrant diaspora in America that the city had plenty of work, construction wages had doubled to $16 an hour and no one was asking for papers.

“It was like a Gold Rush,” said Oscar Calanche, a Guatemalan immigrant who lived in New Orleans before the storm and returned as soon as the waters receded. “In one car there’d be three up front and three or four in the back, with suitcases and tools on top. It looked like a river of people from our countries.”

Latino workers have gutted, roofed and painted houses and hauled away garbage, debris and downed trees. Undocumented workers have installed trailers to house returning evacuees at New Orleans City Park, their pay coming from FEMA subcontractors.

“It’s all illegals doing this work,” said Rey Mendez, a FEMA trailer subcontractor from Honduras.

No one knows how many Latino immigrants are here, but John Logan, a Brown University demographer who has studied the city since Katrina, says “there must be 10,000 to 20,000 immigrant workers in the region by now, and the number is going to grow.”

As the Senate debates new immigration laws and marchers demonstrate across the country, these immigrants offer another reminder of the country’s reliance on undocumented labor from Latin America.

As New Orleans redefines itself after Katrina, the influx of large numbers of Latino immigrants is another jolt for a city that has historically thought of itself as black and white.

There was a post a few days back. That went something like this. Most of the carpenters rebuilding New Orleans were legal US citizens. Busloads of illegal aliens came and worked for less. The US citizen carpenters were LAID OFF and the jobs were given to illegal aliens.

Yeah, we sure need 'em don't we.

There was a story on tv and posted here about licensed electricians who actually showed the illegals what to do. They were then fired since they weren't needed any longer. Imagine that.