The death of six Latino workers in the collapse this week of the Baltimore bridge highlights the contrast between the role that immigrants play in keeping the United States going and Donald Trump’s speech that characterizes them as “invaders” and “criminals.”
“Migrants come for jobs that Americans are known to not want,” said Luis Vega, an activist and former construction worker.
“Who wants to be cleaning hotel rooms? Who wants to walk in the sun? Who wants to be in the fields working?” he asked.
Six workers from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras were the only fatalities in the fall of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in the Port of Baltimore on Tuesday.
Along with two other workers who managed to survive, these men were repairing potholes in the bridge that collapsed when it was hit by a freighter.
“Immigrants do the work,” Tom Perez, director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, told MSNBC on Thursday.
“And that’s what we did a couple of nights ago, the six people who died and the two who survived. This is the United States: immigrants repairing potholes,” he said.
The news shook the Hispanic community in the United States, at a time when political leaders such as former President Trump, campaigning once morest Democrat Joe Biden for the White House, advocate for greater restrictions on immigrants, whom they repeatedly brand as criminals who should be expelled from the country.
“It’s sad because the former president doesn’t see how much damage he poisons people. (…) The terrorists don’t enter through the border, they entered by plane with a visa,” said Vega, who was one of the faces of a pro-immigration campaign in Arizona in 2010, which had the support of figures such as the singer Shakira, the model Vanessa Bryant and the baseball player Sergio Romo.
“In 2020, when we had the covid pandemic, the former president addressed the undocumented [Trump] He accused them of being criminals, drug traffickers, rapists, everything,” he deplored.
“Immigrants are the ones who brought the United States forward, because with covid no one wanted to work physically, to be with another person. So who did the work? The cleaning in the hospitals? The food? The immigrants, they exposed their lives “he insisted.
High risk
Immigrants are extremely vulnerable to exploitation. They work long hours, in precarious conditions and in exchange for low wages, said Javier Galindo, a contractor based in Tucson, Arizona, who began working in construction at age 14.
“On the roofs you will never see a white person (working), which is what I have had to do,” Galindo said.
“In general, they are jobs that immigrants who come from Mexico do and they are always risky,” he added.
In states like Arizona, where the minimum hourly wage is US$14.35, workers receive between US$80 and US$100 per day.
“And you know what time you come in, but not what time you leave,” Galindo noted.
The constant economic need, Vega reinforces, forces immigrants to accept these jobs in risky sectors, with factors that can be lethal, such as high temperatures.
According to official figures, Latino immigrants made up 8.2% of the United States workforce in 2021, but accounted for 14% of workplace deaths.
Fatal accidents also skyrocketed 42% between 2011 and 2021, going from 512 to 727.
Galindo maintains that in his region construction depends entirely on immigrants, with the undocumented in a key role.
“There is a lot of labor shortage,” said the 48-year-old contractor, whose activity was strongly affected by the closure of borders during the covid pandemic, and who, like Vega, defends the legalization of workers.
It is a feeling shared in the sector.
“If we only hired people with papers, the truth is that things would go very badly for us,” said another contractor from Arizona, without identifying himself to avoid retaliation. “Unfortunately we wouldn’t be able to build what is being built in this city if it weren’t for undocumented workers.”
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