Question:
NO MATTER WHAT ALL the politicians and activists want, African Americans
and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the
Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of
them undocumented, will. And when they're done, they're going to stay,
making New Orleans look like Los Angeles. It's the federal government
that will have made the transformation possible, further exposing the
hollowness of the immigration debate.
Answer:
President Bush has promised that Washington will pick up the greater
part of the cost for "one of the largest reconstruction efforts the
world has ever seen." To that end, he suspended provisions of the
Davis-Bacon Act that would have required government contractors to pay
prevailing wages in Louisiana and devastated parts of Mississippi,
Alabama and Florida. And the Department of Homeland Security has
temporarily suspended sanctioning employers who hire workers who cannot
document their citizenship. The idea is to benefit Americans who may
have lost everything in the hurricane, but the main effect will be to
let contractors hire illegal immigrants.
Mexican and Central American laborers are already arriving in
southeastern Louisiana. One construction firm based in Metairie, La.,
sent a foreman to Houston to round up 150 workers willing to do cleanup
work for $15 an hour, more than twice their wages in Texas. The men —
most of whom are undocumented, according to news accounts — live outside
New Orleans in mobile homes without running water and electricity. The
foreman expects them to stay "until there's no more work" but "there's
going to be a lot of construction jobs for a really long time."
Because they are young and lack roots in the United States, many recent
migrants are ideal for the explosion of construction jobs to come. Those
living in the U.S. will relocate to the Gulf Coast, while others will
come from south of the border. Most will not intend to stay where their
new jobs are, but the longer the jobs last, the more likely they will
settle permanently. One recent poll of New Orleans evacuees living in
Houston emergency shelters found that fewer than half intend to return
home. In part, their places will be taken by the migrant workers. Former
President Clinton recently hinted as much on NBC's "Meet the Press" when
he said New Orleans will be resettled with a different population.
Or perhaps, more accurately, one of the largest demographic replacements
and/or ethnic cleansings ever seen in the Western Hemisphere since the
Conquistadores wiped out the Aztecs, Incas, and Caribean islanders in the
1400s and 1500s. This is a real White House wet dream of creating a Works
Project Administration for Mexico. Just as after the last Reconstruction,
the South voted Democrat for 100+ years, this Reconstruction will once again
alienate voters in the South, especially Black voters, for decades to come.
The Blacks from the Gulf region may well be the Okies of the 21st century,
rambling around the country looking for work and equally discriminated
against, feared, despised, and blocked from relocation by communities all
over North America as the Okies in the Dust Bowl era were.
It speaks volumes that a person with a Spanish surname writing for the Times
would paint it as a fait accompli that Mexico will not only be the prime
beneficiary of the hurricane damage, but also that New Orleans will become
like Los Angeles demographically. Perhaps Gregory Rodriguez lacks the
backbone and honesty to say that New Orleans will look like Mexico City if
the White House has its way. America's first Mexican President stands tall
in the saddle in the eyes of his illegal alien and Mexican constituency.
G.., won't Mardi Gras be special in the future Nueva Orleans.
Just think - Dixieland jazz will be replaced with corridas honoring
smugglers, criminals, and dope pushers, the rich, lilting patois of Cajun
replaced by shrill Spanish, throwing Mardi Gras beads will be replaced with
pick-pocket street urchins trying to sell their seester, parades will become
Aztec dances, and the only thing you will get on Bourbon Street will be
tequila and tuberculosis. Now, won't that be special. I guess there will
be a whole new market for gumbo enchiladas.
