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As Los Angeles reels from the devastating wildfires, the immigration policies of the current administration will run afoul of recovery efforts. Experts and advocates met under the aegis of Ethnic Media Services to discuss whether this effort will go anywhere and what steps are being taken to confront the issue and ensure workers' rights.

Immigrants are the backbone of the American economy and are key to many sectors, including construction and other services relevant to the reconstruction after a disaster. In post-apocalyptic fires in Los Angeles , as has happened in every disaster in the United States, immigrants are already hard at work doing the cleanup as the area emerges from its worst disaster ever. Many of these workers are undocumented.

An effective recovery will be key not just for the people who lost their homes but also for the insurance industry and the economy at large. In 2005, President George W. Bush paused employer sanctions after Hurricane Katrina. In 2025, business leaders have already been in touch with the incoming administration to try to damp some of the impetus behind the “mass deportation” plans, as many industries are already at a “lean” point, with a dearth of workers.

Fire burned away our differences at the ground level

Pablo Alvarado, who's co-director of the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, who has been on the ground with day laborers at the Pasadena Job Center near one of the big fires that created destruction in the Altadena area, shared the ground reality. The center is serving about a thousand people every day. These people are from all strata of society which has collapsed. 

“I happen to live in the city of Pasadena. I've been very close to the fires. I've been in the area that has been impacted. The devastation is of biblical proportions,” he said. 

The center has become the place where families and folks who have lost their homes are coming to receive the supplies that they need: from baby formula to diapers for children and adult food, clothing, shoes. 

“You know what I have on, it's all I possess in this life, say many people who come to our work center.”

The homeowner and the housekeeper plus gardener are all coming to the center for help. MAGA people have come out to help workers. As have the democrats and socialists. The fire is the great equalizer. 

Day laborers knocked on people's doors to bring them food. “You're the first ones knocking on my door,” said the homeowners. 

“Not only is my apartment gone but also the house that I cleaned is also gone. “

The construction industry is in dire need of labor

To rebuild from this disaster we need all hands on deck. Jenny Murray, who's president and chief executive officer at the National Immigration Forum said, the construction industry is dependent on foreign born talent, just like healthcare, agriculture. Forty percent of the workforce of the construction industry in California is foreign born. 

“We right now have the lowest birth rate we've ever had. As a nation, we have 8 to 10 million open jobs every single month, and that's been three or four years running nonstop. The lowest unemployment we've ever had. We depend on undocumented workers in this industry.”

Reconstruction after a disaster

“Los Angeles has begun to rebuild from a disaster of unimaginable proportions. 

The extent of destruction in urban areas is unimaginable in terms of scale, cost, the extent of displacement, personal loss and the time it takes to rebuild, said Nick Theodore, Distinguished Professor of the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago who has been studying disasters over the last decade or so, with a focus on climate disasters in cities such as Houston and New Orleans, South Florida etc  “When climate disasters hit urban areas they are quite unique and those costs, regardless of how we measure them, are extraordinary.”

Unstable structures, gas leaks, downed power lines, and toxic ash are hazardous. As are lead and other toxins that are being leached into the earth, going into the groundwater and also into the air creating extremely hazardous situations.

Workers who are helping rebuild those cities are not protected 

“In all cases of climate disasters, the need for remediation and rebuilding is immediate. There's great urgency to do this because of the hazards that are around. Unfortunately, this urgency creates opportunities for worker exploitation,” he said. 

Disaster recovery zones are areas where labor protections have tended to break down.

What he has seen in all cases of climate disasters is that both employers and workers get drawn into the area because there is so much work to be done. In all of the disaster recovery zones that we have studied we have seen unlicensed contractors, often come from out of state to pick up a lot of work. Now, those contractors don't come with their own work crews. Instead, they tend to hire locally. They tend to hire day laborers and other immigrant workers to do this work. So there's a need for them to assemble work crews quite rapidly. Workers get drawn into these work sites and are employed by these contractors Many of whom are unlicensed and are trying to fly under the radar.

“One of the things that we've documented in all of our studies is that the provision of personal protective equipment PPE has always been inadequate. We have situations where workers don't know the conditions that they're walking into. And it is incumbent on the part of employers to make sure that those workers have the PPE necessary to try to safeguard their health and safety when they're walking into these various hazardous situations.”

Wage theft is especially high in disaster recovery zones. In a moment of disaster and crisis the capacity of government enforcement agencies is really stretched thin. Government enforcement of labor standards has never ever been what it needs to be to safeguard workers, when there's a climate disaster, those resources are stretched even thinner.  

In most cases, it's going to be immigrant workers, many of whom are undocumented. who know how to do the work and are helping our communities rebuild. They're working with homeowners, renters, and business owners to try to do the necessary environmental remediation.

Threats of deportation are real and they are being felt at the community level.

In the anti-immigrant rhetoric that we heard during the presidential campaign and what we have seen from this administration over its days in office, it tells us that threats of deportation are real and they are being felt at the community level.

The pernicious effect of this rhetoric is that it has emboldened unscrupulous employers to use immigration-based retaliation against workers. Those threats of immigration retaliation have particular force.

“Workers fear contesting wage theft. They fear contesting unsafe working conditions because we have seen for years employers using immigration-based threats as a way to undermine labor standards in the United States,” he said. 

“Now folks are going to be too afraid to show up for these jobs. “