Immigrants died doing job ‘others do not want to do’

Baltimore: They came to the United States for a chance at a better life. They found work filling potholes on a bridge in the middle of the night, and they ended up dead in the Baltimore harbour.

The six victims of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse were all immigrants from Mexico and Central America, doing the kind of gruelling work that many immigrants take on, when a container ship crashed into a support pillar at 1.30am local time and sent them plunging into the icy Patapsco River.

Divers pulled the bodies of Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes and Dorlian Castillo from a red pickup truck 7.6m underwater the following day.

Four are missing and presumed dead: Maynor Suazo from Honduras; Jose Lopez from Guatemala; Miguel Luna from El Salvador; and another whose name has not been released. Another two workers were rescued.

The news rippled quickly through Baltimore’s Hispanic community, which has nearly doubled in size in recent years, transforming the modest rowhouse neighbourhoods near the sprawling port complex. Churches held vigils for the missing workers, and advocacy groups quickly raised US$98,000 (RM463,589) for the victims’ families.

Some said they weren’t surprised that all of the victims were immigrants, despite accounting for less than 10% of the population in Maryland’s largest city.

“One of the reasons Latinos were involved in this accident is because Latinos do the work that others do not want to do. We have to do it, because we come here for a better life. We do not come to invade the country,” said Lucia Islas, president of Comite Latino de Baltimore, a non-profit group.

Hispanic workers are more likely than other racial and ethnic groups to die on the job, according to the US Labour Statistics Bureau, with construction being a particularly deadly industry.

Government and industry figures show that Hispanics are over-represented in high-risk jobs: 51% of construction workers, 34% of slaughterhouse workers and 61% of landscaping workers.

The workers on the Key Bridge were employed by Brawner Builders Inc, a local construction company that has done extensive work for the state and has been cited seven times since 2018 for safety violations.

Community leaders said many Hispanics in the city take low-paying work providing scant benefits. “The only choice is to work, when you don’t have the same salary that a citizen might earn,” said Carlos Crespo, 53, a mechanic from Mexico.

“Many don’t value our Hispanic community. They see us as animals or think that we live off the government. But that is not true, we pay our taxes too.”

Crespo and others involved in the fundraising effort said it was built on years of similar attempts to help provide a safety net for people who struggle to find affordable healthcare and adequate housing or navigate services that are only provided in English.