Exploitation of Immigrants in Gulf Reclamation Invisible to Officials
Cecilia Muñoz

For 17 years, I’ve been working as an advocate for immigrant rights in Washington, D.C. It takes a lot to astonish me.

But when I heard that the governor of Louisiana told a Congressional committee this month that she had no idea that immigrant workers who are rebuilding New Orleans are suffering abuse at the hands of employers, I couldn’t believe my ears.

Is something that is so obvious to those of us in immigrant communities so invisible to the governor of the state where it’s happening?

When the rebuilding started in the Gulf, we all knew that immigrants would be a part of it. In particular, they are often the day laborers who gather looking for an honest day’s work and end up at construction sites.

But their hard work comes at a real price, especially for those who don’t have immigration papers. Far too many employers take advantage of them, promising wages they don’t deliver.

It’s happening all over the country and it seems to be worse in the Gulf Coast. Billions of federal dollars are flowing to big companies that hire contractors, who hire subcontractors, who eventually hire workers to do the rebuilding.

There are tent cities in church parking lots in Louisiana and Mississippi filled with workers who have no housing. The Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance told my organization, the National Council of La Raza, that at one point it was organizing a food drive so workers who hadn’t been paid could at least eat.

NCLR affiliate Latino Memphis reports that dozens of workers who traveled hundreds of miles from Tennessee to the Gulf Coast for jobs came back without the wages they had been promised.

Another affiliate, CASA de Maryland, just filed a lawsuit on behalf of workers abused by employers in the Gulf.

This is not an invisible phenomenon. The California-based New America Media print network and the national Hispanic Link News Service were reporting last November on the exploitation of teenagers lured from southern Mexico by contractors and then abandoned. Major media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times reported the phenomenon this year, and there was incredible coverage and extensive documentation provided by media in Louisiana and Mississippi.

So how can Gov. Kathleen Blanco not know that it is happening? Are immigrants so invisible even as they play a major role in rebuilding New Orleans?

Governor Blanco isn’t alone. At a meeting this month, officials with the U.S. Department of Labor, the government agency responsible for protecting workers’ rights, also told us that they weren’t aware of the scope of the problem. They couldn’t tell us how many workers have filed claims with their agency or what happens to the claims once they have been filed.

With large numbers of immigrant workers and evidence of large-scale abuse, the department has exactly one bilingual staff person in Mississippi and one bilingual trainee for the whole state of Louisiana. It has no plans to dedicate additional resources to deal with the crisis for workers in the Gulf. It’s as if we are as invisible to the agency as we are to Governor Blanco.

Elsewhere, immigrants certainly aren’t invisible. They are being attacked nearly every day on television and talk radio. You can hardly turn on your television without seeing someone yelling his or her outrage about day labor centers or immigrants in general.

What is happening in the Gulf Coast is an exaggerated version of what’s happening all around the country. We benefit from immigrants’ hard work, but we are unwilling to respect their rights or see to it that these rights are properly enforced. We invite immigrants to work in our most dangerous jobs. Yet we deny them access to care or compensation when they are injured. Then we attack them on the airwaves for being here at all.

I’m familiar with that story. Still it surprises me when the people who are supposed to be leading our country fail to see it as well.

(Cecilia Muñoz is vice president of the National Council of La Raza’s Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation. She may be reached by e-mail at cmunoz@nclr.org)

© 2006 Hispanic Link News Service
2/19/06
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