"Undocumented Workers Take Central Role in U.S. Climate Disaster Recovery,"

When U.S. politicians talk about deporting unauthorized immigrants by the millions, they never seem to talk about the essential labour they provide.

Nearly one in 20 American essential workers is undocumented, writes Rosemary Cairns on the Seeing Like a Local blog. More than five million work in construction, food services, and production (including agriculture), transportation, health care, and other essential industries, says Fwd.us...

One of the areas in which immigrants are becoming increasingly important is recovery and rebuilding after natural disasters. As fewer and fewer Americans want to do the difficult jobs involved, immigrants are filling the void, moving from state to state for half the year to help homeowners recover...

New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman, who did a year’s research before publishing a 2021 article, discovered that disaster recovery was no longer the purview of small mom and pop shops. A lot of multi-billion-dollar corporations were now in charge, and “making a ton of money off of climate change,” Stillman told NPR.

Stillman found that immigrants had begun following natural disasters in order to find work. They were “part of a new transitory work force, made up largely of immigrants, many undocumented, who follow climate disasters around the country the way agricultural workers follow crops, helping communities rebuild,” she wrote.

Given that these resiliency workers had become key to the disaster recovery process, labour advocates began talking about how to improve their working conditions...

Because climate change has increasingly made disasters more frequent and destructive since Katrina, resilience workers are central to an economy that spends tens of billions of dollars a year on repairs, paid for by the federal government and private insurance, [Organiser Saket] Soni said. But they are vulnerable. Most are immigrants who come from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Venezuela, the Philippines, and India, most are undocumented, and most “are dislocated from their own homes, even as they’re rebuilding the homes of others,” he said...