Believe In America.com

butterbean · Joined: 21 Jun 2006 Posts: 2269

NEW ORLEANS -- Daniel Flores, a native Honduran and newcomer to the New Orleans area, leaves the grousing about the pace of hurricane recovery to others. From his perspective, the post-Katrina saga is one of remarkable progress and considerable hope.

He was a teenager in Honduras when Hurricane Mitch devastated that country in 1998. He witnessed the destruction and joined his Boy Scout troop in helping to rescue people from inundated neighborhoods. Eight years later, survivors of Mitch still live in the streets in Honduras, he said.

"Here in New Orleans, it's been only one year, and look at this: The streets are fixed; people are rebuilding houses," said Flores, who was interviewed through a translator. "We're in America, and things work here. The government may be slow sometimes, but it works."

Flores, 25, arrived in the United States five years ago. In June, he moved here from North Carolina after hearing about jobs in the Hurricane Katrina recovery, and he found work painting houses. As proof of his optimism, he sent for his wife and daughter, who remained in North Carolina, and they joined him in July.

They represent a development that grows clearer as more time passes since Katrina: Some of the Hispanic people who streamed into the New Orleans area for work, at first joining what looked like a temporary surge of arrivals who would leave to chase the next storm, are finding more opportunity than despair in the recovery and they are choosing to stay. Meanwhile new additions to the area's Hispanic community -- from blue-collar laborers to contractors and small business owners -- continue to arrive.

A study by Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley found almost half the recovery construction work force in the New Orleans area to be Hispanic. And among workers who have been here at least six months, 65 percent reported they plan to settle here permanently. Most workers came from other states, not directly from their home countries.

For workers like Flores, who has a reliable job with a contractor and speaks some English, or those who are long established in the United States and can buy houses and bring their families, the prospect of sinking roots in the New Orleans area is within easy reach.

The day laborers who gather at corners, gas stations or home supply store parking lots waiting for contractors to arrive in trucks and take them to job sites face greater uncertainty. They wire money back home and might like to bring their families here, but doing so means overcoming considerable obstacles.

For the migrant laborers, more than half of whom are undocumented according to the Tulane-Berkeley study, the promise of plentiful and high-paying jobs doesn't translate into an easy life. They pack into small apartments, sleep on cots in a church shelter or become squatters in abandoned buildings. Contractors sometimes skip out on paying them. They have little access to health care if they get sick or injured. The specter of immigration enforcement is a constant threat.

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http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/waller101306.html

These people are in violation of our laws. Why isn't ICE picking them up and deporting them? Mad