Influx of immigrants work to rebuild Florida
CALLAWAY, Fla. — They arrived by the hundreds last year after Hurricane Michael sliced through the Florida Panhandle, packing 160 mph winds that snapped pine trees in half, mangled steel posts, ripped off roofs and upended people’s lives. Without electricity, potable water or reliable accommodation, a rapid-response labor force got to work carting away the wreckage.
In the ensuing months, the workers — nearly all of them from Central America, Mexico and Venezuela — toiled day and night across Bay County to reopen Panama City’s City Hall, repair the local campus of Florida State University and fix damaged roofs on several churches. In towns like Callaway, which saw 90% of its housing stock damaged by the Category 5 storm last October, they are still working.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 1.2 million Americans live in coastal areas at risk of significant damage from hurricanes. The increased frequency and severity of such disasters have given rise to a new recovery-and-reconstruction workforce.
It is overwhelmingly made up of immigrants.
Like the migrant farmworkers of yesteryear who followed the crops, the hurricane workers move from disaster to disaster. They descended on New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina; Houston after Harvey; North Carolina after Florence; Florida after Irma and Michael. And as the United States confronts more extreme weather caused by climate change, theirs has become a growth industry.
Lorenzo, a 67-year-old from Mexico, is adept at elevating and moving houses to higher ground, and keeps pictures on his cellphone to prove it — mansions he rescued in New Orleans; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Houston.
But since arriving in Bay County during the chaotic weeks after Hurricane Michael, many of the immigrant workers have been exploited by employers who do not always pay what they are owed or landlords who charge exorbitant rent for their temporary quarters. In this relatively conservative corner of the country, some have been stopped by sheriff’s deputies and transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Sometimes we work and work, we trust people, and then we don’t get paid,” said Will, a 44-yearold Honduran immigrant who has worked successive hurricanes since Katrina in 2005. Like others, he asked to be identified only by his first name out of concern that he could be targeted for deportation, which he said was a constant worry.
A Florida law passed this year requires localities to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. In 2018, 24 immigrants were transferred from the Bay County sheriff to ICE, the federal agency that oversees deportations. In the first three months of this year, the most recent period for which data was available, 42 people were transferred.
During a May campaign rally in Panama City Beach, along the coast of Bay County, President Donald Trump did not specifically mention the itinerant workforce carrying out much of the region’s hurricane repairs in a speech that highlighted immigrants in the country illegally.
But in a county where 7 out of 10 voters supported the president in 2016, there has been little political opposition to the hurricane workers.
“We’ve had a lot of Spanish-speaking workers. I say, ‘Thank heaven for them.’ We’d be a lot further from recovering if it weren’t for them,” said Pamn Henderson, mayor of Callaway, who like many homeowners is living in a trailer in her front yard until repairs on her house can be completed.