About a quarter of the construction workers rebuilding New Orleans are illegal immigrants, who are getting lower pay, less medical care and less safety equipment than legal workers, according to a new study by professors at Tulane University and the University of California, Berkeley.
These workers reported making an average of $6.50 an hour less than legal workers and had more trouble collecting their wages, the study said.
While few workers reported run-ins with the police, it said, employers sometimes threatened to have them deported if they complained about missing pay or dangerous working conditions.
The study, which included more than 200 interviews at work sites, is an effort to document working conditions and to measure the influx of Hispanic workers into the city, where they have traditionally been only a small fraction of the population.
The study found that about 45 percent of the reconstruction workers are Hispanic, and at least two-thirds of them arrived after Hurricane Katrina struck.
“It’s a big change, a really big change,” said Phuong Pham, an assistant professor of international development at Tulane and an author of the study.
The number of new Latino workers, which Pham put at 10,000 to 14,000, has probably doubled the percentage of Latinos in the city, to perhaps 8 percent, and that does not include any family members who may have come with the workers.
The population change is obvious to anyone who has watched buildings being gutted or roofs repaired in recent months, but it has proved hard to measure.
For example, a new study by the U.S. Census Bureau shows little change in the number of Hispanic residents of New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina and an increase of about 89,000 along the Gulf Coast, almost all in Texas.
But Karen Paterson, the Louisiana state demographer, said the study could not capture the new Hispanic population, partly because it focused on a sample of housing developed long before.
The new presence of Latinos has been a sore subject in New Orleans. Last fall, Mayor Ray Nagin publicly suggested that the city was in danger of being overrun by Mexican workers, although during his recent re-election campaign he said he welcomed all workers who were willing to help rebuild the city.
Few of the illegal workers said they planned to stay in New Orleans permanently, telling researchers that they would remain as long as there is work.