When U.S. politicians talk about deporting unauthorized immigrants by the millions, they never seem to talk about the essential labour they provide.
Nearly one in 20 American essential workers is undocumented, writes Rosemary Cairns on the Seeing Like a Local blog. More than five million work in construction, food services, and production (including agriculture), transportation, health care, and other essential industries, says Fwd.us.
Twelve states are home to more than 100,000 essential workers who are undocumented, while 40 states have at least 10,000 essential workers who are undocumented. California (one million), Texas (930,000), and Florida (390,000) have the highest number of essential workers who are undocumented.
One of the areas in which immigrants are becoming increasingly important is recovery and rebuilding after natural disasters. As fewer and fewer Americans want to do the difficult jobs involved, immigrants are filling the void, moving from state to state for half the year to help homeowners recover. And in doing so, says one long-time labour organizer, they are changing relationships from fraught to friendly, and creating bonds that help strengthen democracy.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, undocumented labourers, most of them from Mexico and Central America, swept the streets of New Orleans, removed mouldy debris from buildings, cleared rotting food from refrigerators, put FEMA tarps on homes, removed more than 38 million cubic yards of trash and debris, and installed new roofs and sheet rock on buildings when reconstruction began, for an average of about $10 an hour. Undocumented migrants made up about 25% of the construction workers who worked on Katrina repairs.
Some labour laws, and worksite safety enforcement by the Department of Labour, were suspended temporarily after Katrina, meaning that undocumented workers were likely to get hired but far less likely to get promised wages, overtime, or safety equipment, such as gloves, masks, and goggles. Two of three class action lawsuits against federal contractors to recover wages for immigrant workers were settled for more than $900,000, but many migrant workers remained unpaid or underpaid for their work.
In 2017, after Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston, Texas, people wondered who was going to rebuild the nation’s fourth-largest city given a lack of construction workers nationwide. “As people are trying to build back, they’re trying to repair their houses, they’re trying to figure out how to survive the damage, immigrants are playing outsized roles in so many of the professions that are essential to the Texas economy,” said Jeremy Robbins, director of the New American Economy think tank. “If you look at drywall installers or ceiling tile installers and tapers, more than 75% of them nationwide are immigrants.”
While immigrants made up 17% of the state’s population, 27% of the state’s plumbers and 40% of construction workers were foreign born, he said. In Houston, about 40% of plumbers and 63% of construction workers were foreign born.
New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman, who did a year’s research before publishing a 2021 article, discovered that disaster recovery was no longer the purview of small mom and pop shops. A lot of multi-billion-dollar corporations were now in charge, and “making a ton of money off of climate change,” Stillman told NPR.
Stillman found that immigrants had begun following natural disasters in order to find work. They were “part of a new transitory work force, made up largely of immigrants, many undocumented, who follow climate disasters around the country the way agricultural workers follow crops, helping communities rebuild,” she wrote.
Given that these resiliency workers had become key to the disaster recovery process, labour advocates began talking about how to improve their working conditions.
One of those advocates was Saket Soni, who grew up in New Delhi and came to the U.S. on a college scholarship. But he missed a visa deadline and so was undocumented for a time, before becoming a labour organizer in 2005.
After Katrina, he was shocked to discover hundreds of immigrant workers from India trapped in Gulf Coast labour camps. As part of a broad coalition, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center, he helped secure one of the largest human-trafficking settlements in U.S. history: US$20 million.
But he was feeling disillusioned with America until he had a conversation with a mentor, Dr. Vincent Harding, who once advised the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King. “America is a country that is still being born,” he said, and that hope was being born in the places of pain such as post-Katrina New Orleans where a million homes had to be rebuilt and repaired.
It was a lesson “that led me to the places where hope is being born today,” Soni said during a memorable TED Talk in November, 2023. “In the aftermath of hurricanes, floods, and fires. Between the immigrant workers who are doing the rebuilding and the residents who once saw those immigrants as the enemy.” He shares stories of how he has seen this happen.
A year after co-founding Resilience Force in 2017, he met people in Florida who were in despair. “It feels like we went through a hurricane twice,” said one man. So Resilience Force began recruiting workers to build the homes of needy local residents without charge—some of whom believed immigrants should be deported.
“Soni recalled that, after one such meal…. a white mortician who’d hung a sign reading ‘Strangers Will Be Shot’ on his door quietly took it down,” Stillman wrote.
“People have become friends and people have changed their minds,” Soni said. “What that often looks like in Florida or Louisiana is for someone who thought immigration was their most important issue, well, after a hurricane, immigration becomes the 35th most important issue. And what’s more important is, how are we going to stay in this place to survive and thrive again? Who will it take? What family will it take to bring this place back? And that family usually includes the immigrants who helped rebuild the place.”
Because climate change has increasingly made disasters more frequent and destructive since Katrina, resilience workers are central to an economy that spends tens of billions of dollars a year on repairs, paid for by the federal government and private insurance, Soni said. But they are vulnerable. Most are immigrants who come from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, the Philippines, and India, most are undocumented, and most “are dislocated from their own homes, even as they’re rebuilding the homes of others,” he said.
One became a climate refugee after a drought in Honduras wiped out his job in his fishing village. Another was an environmental engineer forced to flee Venezuela. A third had to leave El Salvador to find safety and a better life in America. In the U.S., they often live in the first places they help rebuild—New Orleans, Houston, Florida.
But in some ways, they are in a Catch-22 situation. The fast-growing Texas economy is the envy of other states, says Texas Monthly. “But construction workers lacking legal status have laid the foundations for this miracle. They erected the work camps housing pipe fitters and roughnecks out in the oil fields. They rebuilt Houston after Hurricane Harvey. And they built thousands of apartment complexes and homes, helping Texas avoid the worst of the affordable housing shortage that is crippling other states.”
In an opinion piece in the Houston Chronicle this past March, Stan Marek, CEO of a construction company, pointed out the catch-22:
“Our birth rate is declining, and our economy is growing—meaning that we need workers. If a person is able to get across the border, legal or not, they can find a job the next day.” People will keep coming illegally until the rules are changed, he said, because the magnetic pull of jobs is so strong.
“But if we as citizens and business leaders really want to solve this immigration crisis, now is the time to ask our elected officials to act,” he concluded.
