Immigrants Rush to New Orleans as Contractors Fight for Workers

LA Times ^ | 10/10/5 | Peter Pae

[Crackingham]

Most of the signs are handwritten and simply worded, such as "Workers Wanted" or "Need 50 Laborers Now!"

Word has gotten out and each morning day laborers — who come from Central America and Mexico by way of California, Texas and Arizona — gather on street corners in the Kenner and Metairie neighborhoods on the western edge of the city. Lured by jobs paying $15 to $17 an hour, the Spanish-speaking day laborers have flooded into New Orleans to haul out debris, clear downed trees, put in drywall and perform other tasks as rebuilding takes hold in the city. Specialized roofers can make $300 a day. Contractors know the new day-labor pickup spots. By noon, a tree-trimming firm hires the last available hand on Williams Boulevard near Interstate 10.

"We've never had Hispanic day laborer sites. That's a totally new phenomenon," said David Ware, a longtime New Orleans immigration lawyer.

With 140,000 homes destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans is undergoing the nation's largest reconstruction effort and its new workforce is largely Latino. No one knows how many immigrants have descended here since Katrina ravaged the city five weeks ago, but their presence is visible throughout the city.

Abimael and Filegonia Diaz may have been among the first wave of newcomers. Since Sept. 12, the couple has been clearing debris, washing windows and sweeping floors at a hotel in downtown New Orleans. For six years, Abimael worked in Nashville as a day laborer and sent money to Filegonia and their three young children in Mexico.

"We'll stay here because I think the job will last a long time," Abimael Diaz said. "If we can make enough money, we would like to buy a house and bring our children to New Orleans."

[blam]

"If you are unemployed in some place like Michigan or Pennsylvania, where democrats have killed any economic growth, I suggest you move to New Orleans or at least temporarily relocate there. You will be working for the next 3 years."

The headlines in the Mobile Register yesterday was complaining about the labor shortage here and in the region.

My youngest brother told me he was offered a job towing travel trailers (using his truck) from Hattiesburg, Miss to Biloxi, Miss, hooking up to the drain, electricity and water = $,1,000.00 each.(All hook-up parts are supplied)
He estimated that he and one helper could do three a day. His present boss told him he could have a leave-of-absence to take advantage of that offer.

[jwpjr]

I was in NO and Jefferson Parish, and Biloxi and Pascagoula and Gulfport, the week after Katrina. I had a contract with one of the big disaster recovery contractors to photograph their crews at work. One of the groups I spent time with were the guys who were removing debris. These guys come from all over the country. The ones I was with have a truck-trailer combination with a crane attached for loading and unloading the debris. They are paid $6 a cubic yard to haul debris to the dump site. The big rigs can carry 70 cubic yards a load, or $420 a load. They are independent contractors in every sense of the word, so it's up to them if they are going to make it worth their while to be there. They average 10 loads a day, or about $4,200 a day. The work seven-days-a-week from sunup to sundown.

The level of regulation these guys have to deal with is staggering. Everyone has a finger in the pie of telling them what they can do and how they can do it.

As your brother has learned, there is a good living to be made if you have the equipment and the desire to work.

I can't tell you how happy I was to be on the Pontchartrain Causeway headed back to Central Florida!

[Vigilanteman]

Simple test: Walk into any job service office in the country and apply to be in their database. They first thing they'll want is a social security number. See how quick it takes to run it and find out if it is legitimate or belongs to someone else.

Coupled with a photo ID (such as a state issued driver's license or ID, not a fake Consular Card), it doesn't take very long to find out if someone is here legally or not. Legal residents of foreign extraction also have green cards.

[BlackbirdSST]

I wonder what TexMex Cajun tastes like? :)

Volatile rumbling comes to mind. I'm sure we'll know soon enough. Blackbird.

[reformedliberal]

I think this is a national phenomena.

I was told yesterday that on the Iowa/Wisconsin/Minnesota border there are no manufactured homes to be had. FEMA has purchased them all.

[Iscool]

Why aren't the people who live there on welfare not grabbing those jobs?

It's likely they are not allowed to work...When American employers hire Americans, they have to follow the American laws...This makes American employees pretty undesirable...

[NewRomeTacitus]

Lets sum this up:

The Federal government gave its blessing/permission for contractors to use illegal aliens for the necessary reconstruction - before any other idea of any kind had a chance to be raised. Meanwhile nearly 500,000 displaced blacks, a bare majority who were unemployed before the hurricane are now in other locales still on the dole or are finding employment through government or private organization's efforts. I've found nothing but positive stories but that may be due to media bias.

Our fellow citizens have a commonly shared conception that urban areas of black majority are "ruined" by the Johnsonian policies that allowed overdependence on government aid while doing nothing to stop the fragmentation of black culture (fatherless families, easy abortions, handout mentality). Inversely, the illegal population allowed in by Federal negligence/corruption has a high motivation to labor because they lack any of those options - deportation, though increasingly remote, remains a primary motivator for them to make money as quickly as possible. Perversely, the illegals from nations South of our border have edged blacks out of the jobs they traditionally depended upon. This did not occur because the blacks were "lazy", though the entitlement culture from the Johnson Administration did them no favors by it's helping make negative stereotypes like "welfare Cadillacs" and "Food Stamp queens" visibly apparent to anyone with eyes. Our government let the blacks (and everyone else) down after this ruinous experiment by allowing employers to slide using the illegal aliens.

This unspoken yet real policy not only craps on all fairness and law, it sends the nation-killing message that it's perfectly all right to use people who don't belong here for whatever abusive labor one can think of - free of EPA, IRS, union or any other bothers - so long as the bones don't stick up after you're done with them. Health plans, education and the bad relatives they bring are all on the taxpayers backs free of charge. Unless you're a taxpayer not utilizing illegal aliens.

Meanwhile erstwhile honest employers in every field are increasingly pressured to utilize illegals because their competitors are using them to undercut the fair market. Nothing fair about it when these scum pay the illegals a pittance and pocket the profits - laughing all the way to the bank while those trying to do it right suffer from the unfair competition. Outsourcing and offshoring headquarters are larger versions of the same scam - just with a higher bribe for the politicians who cover for it. All of it is bad for America. "Bad for America" is a quaint notion held by troglodytes like myself who are sick of seeing our nation's strengths, principles and policies subverted for short term profits and well placed individual's personal gain. See "After Reagan".

The Americans of African descent could easily rebuild New Orleans. History proves their descendants were hardier than the native Indians of the New World and a few other imported experiments. The only thing preventing New Orleaners from rebuilding their hometown is prejudice, misconceptions, forty years of a wrongful dependence mindset and a Federal government that needs to get it's head out of it's @ss (deport criminals - I don't pay you to hire them!). Those citizens are sitting in shelters two months out now. Put hammers and lumber in their hands and check everyone's documents. There's a bus service named Adame that trucks the illegals in, it goes back to the same points they came from. Americans need this work not only for rebuilding their community, but to reestablish/relearn the pride of accomplishment and to once again have an investment in their community. For the government to promote illegals to do it guarantees major problems while telling the black community that they're regarded as next to worthless.

And Rokke: the illegals do what they do not because they're superior or "nicer", but because they are desperate. While I, too, feel sorry for them the bottom line is that they're not our fault and not our actual problem. We'd help them and their parasitic governments far better by kicking them out and slamming the door. Until we force change (like we're trying to do with the Islamic fruitbaskets overseas) we'll only suffer from the slow death that parasites lay on a host unwilling to get rid of them.

[PAR35]

Lets sum this up.

Some unskilled folks are willing to work for $15 to $17 an hour, some aren't.

Some semi-skilled laborers are willing to work for $1500 per week, some aren't.

The ones who are willing to work on these terms generally aren't entitled to welfare benefits and can speak Spanish.

[NewRomeTacitus]

Didn't need the snideness, especially since it obscured your message. Are you trying to justify the use of illegals if they truly are the only ones willing to do work Americans are supposedly unwilling to do? I have friends with Masters Degrees willing to do anything for $17 an hour, so that can't be right.

I don't know what you've ben hearing, but illegals have been seen cleaning out weeks-old decayed shrimp remains and defecated carpeting without any protective gear - their offtime spent in areas lacking running water to sanitize with. Our government is suspending civilization and treating a desperate wage pool as expendable tools for expedience much like the former Soviet Union utilized Jews and other minorities.

We're supposed to be better than that. Cutting the politically favored out of the rebuilding effort might reestablish the rules of civilization.

Seriously, we need a far better model than what's happening there. This has taught me to stock up for possible disaster. Ammunition, water, food, ammunition, clothing, medicines, ammunition...

[KevinDavis]

Here is how I see it:

People has to get off their butts and get the jobs themselves.... If they want work, they can get it themselves.. There is no right to work clause in the Constitution.....

[Black Tooth]

The illegals will build a city that many long time residents (aka ghetto dwellers) have never worked in for generations.

So with your logic, illegal aliens will be rebuilding the World Trade Center. The contractors in New York ought to be able to rebuild them cheap!! Remind me never to go up in the new buildings.

[Westlander]

$2.50 a gallon? That's cheap compared to Michigan.

[Rokke]

"Those citizens are sitting in shelters two months out now. Put hammers and lumber in their hands and check everyone's documents."

You clearly have not spent time in a city dominated by a welfare mindset. When taking the time out to register for welfare benefits is considered "too much work", you could put as many hammers as you want into the hands of people ruined with that mindset, and the most active response you will incite is complaining that the hammers are too heavy, not new enough, and not provided with some sort of paid training program. If you think that is just too cynical, I invite you to take a trip to downtown Memphis. FedEx will hire just about anyone, provide great benefits and the opportunity for a lifetime of employment and promotion without even a high school diploma (which it will also help you get). The result of that great deal... a turnover of new employees the reaches almost 100% a year. Once folks realize they are actually expected to accomplish something while they're getting paid, they take their free FedEx workgear and quit without so much as a courtesy wave.

"While I, too, feel sorry for them the bottom line is that they're not our fault and not our actual problem."

You've missed the point completely. The last breakfast I ordered in Memphis was delivered to me cold and without a smile by a lady who said nothing more than "What do you want" the entire time I was in the restaurant. Contrast that with this morning. Great food delivered as ordered by a waiter who not only smiled but acted like I was the most important diner in a fine French restaurant rather than some poor schmuck in a diner. I tipped him 30% out of gratitude. I don't care where the guy came from, or where he's going. If I owned a restaurant I would chose to hire him in a heartbeat over the bums (albeit born and raised in this nation of opportunity) in Memphis.

[PAR35]

Didn't need the snideness

So it's snide when I say "Let's sum this up" but not when you say it?

I've done a little bit of traveling in parts of rural Mexico where some of these folks come from. They are routinely exposed to chemicals which are banned in the US, they drink water that would likely make you are me very ill, and the sanitary facilites in New Orleans are not far removed from those experienced a generation ago by white, black and brown migrant workers. And as for protective gear, few workers in any industry had the advantage of that before OSHA came along.

[raybbr]

Do you think the employers would not hire locals first to do the work if they were willing to fill the positions?

Hey, Poodlebrain, the locals were all shipped out. They'll never get a chance to work because someone decided they didn't deserve it.

[raybbr]

There is a huge shortage of workers that is pushing up labor rates.

And, why is that? Because they were all shipped out under the guise of charity. Where is the charity in taking a man away from his home and letting some illegal in to rebuild it and take it over? GW's strategery? Most likely. We know now that he values the illegal hispanic over the average American.

[Riverman94610]

I agree,its not racial,its cultural.
I must comment that I knew a lot of well to do white kids growing up in California who had the same welfare state mentality as any ghetto project dweller.But instead of the government being their sugar titty it was daddy and mommy who never expected their little darlings to do a lick of REAL work and gave them nearly every damn thing they wanted,including trips to Europe and new cars for high school graduation.

[CajunConservative]

I wonder what TexMex Cajun tastes like? :)

It's going to be really good and even more spicy.

[rasblue]

>A friend told me he was looking for some yard help one >weekend and the guys hanging out at HomeDepot said they >wanted doubletime because it was Sunday.

Supply and Demand. Pure Capitalism. If your friend didn't like the terms of employment thats his problem. In the construction industry, and in fact most blue collar industries, Sunday is double time.