New Orleans will end up looking like Los Angeles soon, thanks to the flood of illegal workers flooding in from south of the border to do the rebuilding along the Gulf Coast. That’s the prediction of a Los Angeles Times commentary.
Why will this be? The Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended sanctions against employers hiring workers who fail to document their citizenship.
The idea is to benefit Americans who may have lost everything in the hurricane with the rebuilding, but the main effect will be to let contractors hire illegal immigrants.
Given the snail’s pace of rebuilding, the Bush administration’s “idea” strikes pretty hollow. It’s all about cheap labor.
Which is why the White House suspended the Davis-Bacon Act in Louisiana and devastated parts of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The pesky law inconveniently requires government contractors to pay prevailing wages when being paid with congressionally appropriated funds.
Writer Gregory Rodriguez, a contributing editor to The LA Times and Irvine Senior fellow at the New America Foundation, makes note of some fascinating historical data, stretching back to Irish immigrants building the Erie Canal, Italians building the New York Subway (great tile work, by the way), and Chinese building the transcontinental railroad.
Also, a more recent precedent:
The effects of Hurricane Andrew may better foretell New Orleans’ future. The 1992 storm displaced 250,000 residents in southeastern Florida. The construction boom that followed attracted large numbers of Latin American immigrants, who rebuilt towns such as Homestead, whose Latino population has increased by 50% since then.
Unfortunately, the fascinating train of thought trails off with passing mention of the “black-white divide” and leads to nowhere but praise for the Bush administration’s proposed guest worker program:
Last week, the White House said it will push its plan to allow illegal immigrants already in the U.S. to become legal guest workers. Good. Hurricane Katrina exposed the nation’s black-white divide. Post-Katrina reconstruction will soon spotlight the hypocrisy of refusing to grant legal status to those who will rebuild the Gulf Coast and New Orleans.
What doe that mean? Let’s ignore high unemployment among African Americans and working-class whites (many displaced across the country by Katrina’s savage fury) in the favor of a new guest worker program for lower wages? Just because a guest worker program will probably happen, doesn’t mean it is sensible or fair. It will just allow developers to profit off lower wages paid for by US taxpayers and perhaps trigger a “black-latino divide.”
After all, African Americans helped build the US economy for more than 200 years free-of-charge until the bloodbath of the Civil War. That “pre-Katrina effect” had no guests. It was called “slavery” and enforced with whips, chains, gunpoint, and the tearing apart of families on the auction block. Those slaves that complained were greeted with threats of being sold “down river.” No doubt, many of their descendents found their way to New Orleans.
I think I will leave my thoughts to trail off now.
Here’s the full LA Times commentary.
And more on my rant.
