PressEthic

The Los Angeles Times published an article on September 25th by Gregory Rodriguez titled “La Nueva Orleans”. The article talks about how the Bush administration has decided to “suspend provisions of the Davis-Bacon Act that would have required government contractors to pay prevailing wages” to clean up after hurricane Katrina.

What does this mean? Basically it means that contractors, such as Halliburton, can get away with paying around $15 an hour to Mexican immigrants to get rid of toxic sludge without providing benefits such as health insurance. For some reason this interesting info is not stated so bluntly in the article.

This may be great for illegal immigrants, as $15 and hour is more than twice what they are making in Texas, but don’t be mistaken that the government is just trying to be nice. The contractors are going to save a ton of money by employing these illegal aliens to do the dirtiest, and most hazardous, cleaning of New Orleans.

Gregory Rodriguez doesn’t include this “other” information in this article – how the Bush administration is basically making sure the good ol’ boys, like Dick Cheney, earn as much money as possible. Not only did the government hire contractors without going through a quoting process, they’re making sure the contractors they did hire get away with hiring the cheapest labor.

And what happens to this cheap labor once the city has been rebuilt? Will they get deported? Will they finally get the chance to become American citizens? Rodriguez doesn’t say. This reporter is leaving out all the juicy information!

No matter how dirty the job is to clean up Katrina’s mess, why make it hard for poor citizens who are willing to work do so. This article mentions that fewer than half displaced New Orleans residents plan to return. I think that the people who do want to return should have the opportunity to work, with benefits, before illegal immigrants do. Who is going to hire a legit worker and pay them more when the government is allowing you to hire cheap labor instead?

I think Rodriguez painted a too optimistic view of the situation. The best quote in the whole article comes in the second to last paragraph:

“…neither the American public nor the government will admit their dependence on a labor force that is heavily undocumented.”

When President Vicente Fox offered Mexican construction workers to President Bush, Bush looked past him. Because why go through hiring legal workers when you have a population of illegal workers in our backyards. This is what the article should have focused on, not a history lesson of immigrant workers in the U.S.