Shadow army of immigrants is crucial part of hurricane recovery

In the aftermath of calamity, an itinerant army of undocumented migrants has been summoned from the shadows, tasked to do what American workers eschew.

They’re coming to clear the rubble and to rebuild communities wrecked by Hurricane Ian. A timely recovery would be impossible for Southwest Florida without this crucial workforce. Which, for a xenophobic governor, creates a political paradox.

The demographic characterized as criminal interlopers by Ron DeSantis are the very folks who provide the grit and muscle needed to make devastated communities livable again.

Immigrant laborers, like itinerant farm workers who travel from harvest to harvest, follow in the wake of climate disasters to where locals discover that desperation trumps the need to check for green cards.

After Hurricane Harvey caused such misery in East Texas in 2017, the Migrant Policy Institute found that 72% of the day laborers manning the recovery efforts “were unauthorized immigrants, with nearly half from Mexico and most of the rest from Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador.”

They’re the workers willing to slog into snake-infested ruins to clear rubble, haul away debris and remove rotted wood, soggy carpets, twisted flashing, splintered trusses and drywall gone black with toxic mold. A 2009 study out of UCLA found that the day laborers recruited to clear and rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina — mostly Latin American immigrants — were exposed to hazardous levels of mold, chemicals, asbestos and other dangers that in a normal workplace would warrant an OSHA investigation.

In storm-stricken areas, immigrants sleep in tents or their trucks or crowd into cheap hotel rooms or live in makeshift dormitories. They work for labor contractors who know undocumented immigrants have little recourse in pay disputes or injury claims.

After the cleanup, when rebuilding begins, many stay around to offset the chronic shortage of construction workers. Even before Hurricane Ian struck, the U.S. construction industry was struggling to fill 400,000 job vacancies. In Florida, according to Construction Dive, an industry newsletter, the unemployment rate among construction workers before the storm was just 2.7%.

Work in the miserable shambles of a disaster area, where much of the affordable housing has been rendered uninhabitable, hasn’t much appeal to an American construction worker who can find plenty of work elsewhere. But there’s a ready supply of willing workers waiting in the shadows.

The New York Post reported this past week that labor contractors were already recruiting van-loads of immigrants at city homeless shelters for recovery work in Florida.

The irony, of course, is that the Southern states most vulnerable to hurricanes are the most hostile toward undocumented workers from Central and South America. Florida’s immigrant disaster workers are coming to a state run by the governor who on Sept. 14 wasted $615,000 in state money on a madefor-Fox News political stunt, flying 48 hapless, misinformed asylum-seekers (not illegal immigrants) from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

DeSantis could make more efficient use of taxpayer money by flying planeloads of immigrants from the Texas border to Fort Myers or Cape Coral or Naples or Sanibel, where they’re sorely needed.

That is, if these workers are willing to risk moving to a state where demagogues think denigrating immigrants lends them political advantage.

In 2019, a crowd at a Trump political rally in Panama City Beach — apparently lacking a communal sense of irony — cheered then-President Donald Trump as he referenced his infamous claim that unauthorized immigrants crossing the Mexican border were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

They cheered Trump even while hundreds of undocumented immigrants were working across town and in other Panhandle communities to repair the damage caused when Hurricane Michael made landfall the year before.

Meanwhile, at DeSantis’ behest, Florida lawmakers have passed anti-immigrant legislation that forces local law enforcement agencies to detain suspected illegal immigrants until federal immigration enforcement agents take them into custody. That’s good for pleasing Trump voters. Not so good for luring crucial disaster workers to Florida.

Even amid the ruin and rubble that won’t be fixed without a mighty army of immigrant workers, DeSantis can’t help himself. At a news conference in Fort Myers on Tuesday, the governor conflated all undocumented immigrants with three suspected looters arrested in Lee County.

“These are people who are foreigners,” he said, as if looting was a peculiarly un-American pursuit. “They should be prosecuted, but they need to be sent back to their home country. They should not be here at all.”

Hopefully, the governor’s rhetoric won’t scare the other kind of “foreigners” away from Southwest Florida — those willing to do what Americans won’t.