WP: In New Orleans, No Easy Work for Willing Latinos

[Pirate Smile]

In New Orleans, No Easy Work for Willing Latinos
Much Is to Be Done, but Pay, Conditions Are Grim

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 18, 2005; Page A03

NEW ORLEANS -- The come-on was irresistible: Hop in the truck. Go to New Orleans. Make a pile of cash.

Arturo jumped at it. Since that day when he left Houston, more than two months ago, he has slept on the floors of moldy houses, idled endlessly at day-laborer pickup stops and second-guessed himself nearly every minute.

For Arturo and countless Latinos, many of them also in the country illegally, flooded-out New Orleans has not turned out to be a modern-day El Dorado, where the streets are paved with gold. Instead, they have often been abandoned without transportation or shelter by the contractors who brought them to the city. They have struggled to find employment and been paid less than they were promised -- or not at all -- when they can find work.

"This is no way to live," Arturo said wearily in Spanish. "I don't know how much longer I can take it."

Arturo, a dour Mexican from Michoacan who did not want to disclose his last name for fear of deportation, stands at the nexus of the post-Hurricane Katrina labor crisis in New Orleans. A city desperate for workers is filling with desperate workers who either cannot find jobs or whose conditions are so miserable, and whose salaries are so low, that they become discouraged and leave.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/17/AR2005121700932.html

[UTUSN]

1. Yip, Univision Covered This, How Illegals Are Scammed, a Few Wks Ago

And Dems need to FOCUS on separating the MIXING/BLURRING of issues that the wingnuts want mixed and blurred: We are not FOR illegal immigration, we are about social justice, humane treatment, and civil rights.

Anyway, the Univision report showed the illegals warehoused in barracks with plywood bunkbeds, looking like concentration camp or plantation slave beds. And in came a White overseer running the Univision cameras out. The scam was that the illegals were/are worked with promised pay for the future. As the payday draws nigh, they are told there is going to be an Immigration raid, so they take off scared----and payless.

Mr NAGIN's words about not wanting to be "overrun by Mexican workers" rings hollow. As for wanting to keep the jobs with locals, who is drawing the illegals there?