Source: AFP
The deaths of six Latino pothole workers when a Baltimore bridge collapsed underscores the critical role immigrants play in keeping America running, advocates say.
And it stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric of populists like Donald Trump, who have called them criminal invaders who are destroying the country.
“Immigrants come and do the jobs that Americans don’t want to do,” said Luis Vega, an activist and former construction worker.
The work is too difficult, the hours are too long or the conditions too difficult.
“Who here wants to clean hotel rooms? Who wants to work under the hot sun? Who wants to be in the fields?” Vega said.
An eight-man crew was doing road maintenance overnight Monday into Tuesday on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when a massive container ship crashed into a support pillar, sending nearly the entire span into the Patapsco River.
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Two were pulled from the water alive, but six died. brothers, husbands and fathers from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
“Immigrants — we’re getting the job done,” said senior White House adviser Tom Perez, who is Latino.
“The six people who perished, the other two who survived … this is America, immigrants (were) fixing potholes.”
Source: AFP
The tragedy comes as many Latinos feel under attack from sections of the political class as the United States prepares for a bitter presidential election in November between Trump and Joe Biden.
Trump’s strident anti-immigration campaign has included suggestions that, if elected, he would begin a mass deportation of people he blames for the crime and drug addiction he says are destroying America.
“The former president doesn’t see how much damage he’s doing with his poison,” Vega said.
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“Terrorists don’t sneak across the US-Mexico border, they fly in with visas.”
The people who pay smugglers to smuggle them across the hostile deserts of the US Southwest are the people who end up doing the dirty and difficult jobs that Americans depend on.
“In 2020, when we had the Covid pandemic … nobody wanted to work closely with another person,” Vega said.
“So who did the work? Cleaning the hospitals? Harvesting the food? It was the migrants who risked their lives.”
High Risk
These dangers, even if they are not always fatal, as they were for the workers on the Baltimore bridge, are very real.
In Arizona the legal minimum wage is $14.35 an hour, but, says Javier Galindo, a contractor in Tucson, migrant workers will earn only $80 to $100 a day, sometimes for 10 or 12 hours of work.
“You know what time you’re coming in, but not what time you’re leaving,” he says.
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Poverty and desperation force migrants to accept these wages and work in potentially fatal conditions such as high temperatures.
According to official numbers, Latino immigrants made up 8.2 percent of the United States workforce in 2020-2021, but accounted for 14 percent of workplace deaths.
The overall number of deaths has also increased, up 42 percent over the decade to 2021, with 727 Latinos dying on the job that year.
Source: AFP
Basic immigration reform in the United States, including streamlining job pathways, would help reduce that tax, activists say.
But it will also alleviate what many say is a desperate labor shortage.
“There is a lack of manpower,” says Galindo, whose business was hit hard by border closures during the Covid pandemic.
The 48-year-old began his professional life at the age of just 14, climbing over rooftops.
“You’ll never see a white man doing this job,” he said.
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In the two decades since he started his company, only one white American has ever knocked on his door asking for a job as a driver.
“He didn’t last long,” Galido laughs. “He left work.”
Source: AFP
In his district, he says, the construction sector is almost entirely dependent on immigrants, with irregulars playing a key role.
It’s a widely shared sentiment.
“If we only hired people with the right papers, things would go very badly for us,” an Arizona contractor told AFP.
“We couldn’t build what’s being built in this city if it weren’t for undocumented workers.”
Source: AFP