Thread: Big Easy uneasy about migrant wave

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Big Easy uneasy about migrant wave
Thousands of Latino laborers have beaten a path to hurricane-battered New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in a quest for paychecks. Hopes are high. So are tensions.

By Michael Martinez
Tribune national correspondent

November 3, 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- Every day throughout the French Quarter and downtown, the ranks of deeply tanned, Spanish-speaking men in soiled clothing grow and become more visible amid the ruin.

Two men from Mexico, now working here for a Houston contractor, are being tossed out of a Bourbon Street strip joint because they don't have any U.S. identification. "They're coming from all parts" of Mexico, one man said of his compatriot illegal migrants.

On nearby Canal Street, bisecting the city's heart, where street gutters are lined with putrid debris, Jaime Salas Aguilar, 27, wanders about with a desperate and hungry look. "You got any work?" he asks a visitor.

A native of the Mexican state of San Luis Potosi who paid a smuggler $2,000 three years ago to guide him illegally across the Arizona desert, Salas, whose features hint of his Mayan ancestry, left Atlanta for New Orleans about a month back because he had heard of bigger paychecks here.

He is among uncounted thousands of migrant Latino laborers beating a path to New Orleans and other parts of the hurricane-battered Gulf Coast, sensing an extraordinary opportunity for jobs if they're willing to work 70 to 80 hours a week for $8 an hour or better.

They face harsh living conditions, ranging from tent camps to dilapidated motels, and they often are cheated out of their full earnings by labor brokers.

The emergence in New Orleans of America's ubiquitous pool of illegal immigrant workers--estimated at up to 12 million nationwide--is straining ethnic tolerance in a city that had counted only 3 percent of its population as Hispanic. That was before Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29.

More migrants, more tension

The swelling numbers of Hispanic migrant laborers, legal or not, have raised political tensions. A Tulane University historian speaks of a possible "population swap" between the city's evacuated black population and its new Latino workforce, and the backlash was fueled by New Orleans' African-American mayor, C. Ray Nagin, who recently uttered remarks deemed offensive by some.

"How do I make sure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?" Nagin asked at an October forum with business people as he discussed the city's future.

That comment prompted rebukes from both African-American organizations typically friendly to rising leaders such as Nagin and from Latino groups, which together called the comment "an example of remarks that can divide Americans at a time when we need to be united."

"We are united in the belief that legitimate concerns should not be the catalyst for pitting one group against another," said the joint statement by the National Urban League, the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Asian American Justice Center.

As more Latinos move into the region, a September survey found that most New Orleans evacuees in Houston, a large percentage of them black, didn't plan to return.

Officials don't have a count of the Hispanic workers in the Gulf Coast region, but their presence--made more visible because they are working in evacuated areas--has drawn attention to the demographic, economic and legal impacts of such a large, cheap labor force--a good portion of it composed of illegal immigrants.

In general, the issue of wages to laborers, regardless of race, has proved a controversy powerful enough to reach the White House.

Bush rescinds law's suspension

Last week President Bush rescinded his suspension of a federal wage law, the Davis-Bacon Act. The suspension had temporarily allowed contractors with federal contracts involved in post-Katrina rebuilding to pay workers less than the prevailing wage.

"While my state experiences unemployment rates not seen since the Great Depression, it is unconscionable that illegal workers would be brought into Louisiana, aggravating our employment crisis and depressing earnings for our workers," Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) said in a statement.

The "change of course by the White House is a significant victory for Louisiana workers and the basic American principles of fairness," she said in another statement.

As Hispanic immigrant workers have filled hotels and set up camps in New Orleans and along the battered gulf rim, one work site in particular is under investigation by immigration authorities.

It's the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station outside New Orleans, where Landrieu said the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is investigating reports of Halliburton subcontractor BE&K employing at least 10 undocumented workers.

Last week, ICE agents apprehended two employees of BE&K, an engineering firm, at the naval air station after agents found the employees had falsified statements in the firm's employment applications, said BE&K spokeswoman Susan Wasley.

Wasley said she didn't know the nature of the statements. Working for Halliburton's KBR subsidiary, BE&K Inc., based in Birmingham, Ala., has sent 289 employees to the military base to repair damage from Katrina, Wasley said.

"BE&K had no knowledge that the documents were fraudulent and [has] cooperated fully with ICE in their review," according to a company press release.

The immigration agency says it found 10 illegal workers at the military base on Oct. 20 and detained six more on Friday. The agency has declined to identify or rule out any subcontractors in its ongoing investigation, said spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback.

Louisiana electricians told a Senate hearing last month that they were dismissed after two weeks from a job that was supposed to last 20 months at Belle Chasse. The electricians also testified that they had been asked to train "unskilled, lesser-paid and non-English-speaking workers to take their place," Landrieu said.

Illegal workers risk much

In downtown New Orleans, illegal immigrant workers such as Salas know the risks for lucrative work on the underground labor market.

He and 19 other Mexican workers loaded into a labor contractor's van from Atlanta two weeks ago, Salas said.

The emergence of "labor contractors" on the gulf shore replicates a black-market practice found among farm workers in California and elsewhere, said Jeffrey Ponting, directing attorney for the indigenous farmworker project of California Rural Legal Assistance Inc.

Such contractors are essentially middlemen who round up Latino workers, frequently illegal immigrants, in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere, said Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. The labor contractors then sell the manpower to construction contractors, he said.

Too often, laborers are cheated out of wages or placed in inadequate housing, Chandler said.

Salas said he didn't receive more than $1,000 in wages after the contractor abandoned him. In Atlanta, he had earned $12 an hour and worked as many as 40 hours a week. He earned $8 an hour in New Orleans but was employed 70 to 80 hours weekly--the long hours resulting in a bigger paycheck, he said.

Salas expressed astonishment when told of Mayor Nagin's remarks.

"It's bad for him to say that because we're here to work and help put the city back together," Salas said as he took a break from asking contractors for work. "There's a lot of work here, but the Americans and the blacks are asking for a lot of money to work."

In an example of the vulnerability of illegal workers, Salas was mugged on Canal Street near the French Quarter's raucous corridor of Bourbon Street. He was robbed of everything, he said, including $30 in cash, a $50 phone card and the phone numbers for his brother in Atlanta and the labor contractor.

With a festering bloody lip and a sore head, Salas didn't have his Mexican voter's registration card or other identification, so he couldn't even take a bus to Atlanta, he said.

Salas, who never attended school, was homeless and penniless last week on Canal Street--until he could find another job.

"I have absolutely, absolutely nothing," he said, pulling his pockets inside out to prove it. "I am totally lost."

Then, a Chicago contractor of Latino background working in one of the city's major hotels approached Salas on the street to strike up a conversation.

But the contractor, who asked that his name be withheld, passed on Salas after seeing his fat lip--a risk in an environmental cleanup of the hotel, he said.

"No open sores," the contractor said as he walked away.

I for one feel no sympathy whatsoever for Salas. He's illegal. He should take his uneducated self back to Mexico where he belongs.