By Jairo Mejia

New Orleans, Sep 8 (EFE).- Hispanics who came to New Orleans in 2005 and helped rebuild the city after Hurricane Katrina are called “cazahuracanes” (hurricane hunters), but many were hired under false promises, exploited to the hilt and deported when they were no longer needed.

A decade after the storm and floods, some neighborhoods in the Crescent City have acquired an unmistakable Latino flavor, but many immigrants live under the threat of deportation, forced to live as second-class citizens.

After the collapse of the levies in the wake of Katrina, reconstruction funds began flowing to private contractors who at first did not ask questions about migrants’ legal status, and then they actively hired undocumented workers, threatening them with deportation if they dared to demand better working conditions.

“Later on, (contractors) found there was another option, cheaper and legal,” Daniel Castellanos, a Peruvian who founded the Alianza de Trabajadores Huespedes in 2007, told EFE.

And that is the H-2 temporary work visa, allowing workers to be hired in their home countries.

Workers pay application and processing fees, as well as for the trip, with many of them going into debt to cover the costs and often, once they arrive in the United States, they find out that the real conditions are not the ones they agreed to.

Castellanos’s story is similar to that of thousands of Latinos who came to Louisiana after Katrina and are still being exploited.

He was promised an H-2B visa to work in construction at $15 an hour after spending $5,000 to get to Louisiana.

When Castellanos arrived, the job was at a hotel with a $5 hourly wage with food and boarding discounted.

“Sometimes, at the end of the month, they would give you a check for zero dollars for your work,” Castellanos said, likening the system to modern slavery.

“We would sleep on cots surrounded by rats and roaches, and later on we learned that the food they were charging us for was supplied for free to them by the federal government,” Castellanos said.

“Now, this has extended to construction, the shrimp industry, the shipyards,” Castellanos said. “Immigrants work welding and breathing toxic gases. If something bad happens, the employer washes his hands.”

The U.S. government has an annual quota of more than 120,000 H2 visas for temporary workers, employed mostly in agriculture, construction and the hospitality industry.

“They are indentured workers. They are treated as objects, not as human beings,” Castellanos said, adding that the migrants who slowly have been organizing themselves have made common cause with blacks, the other forgotten community in the South.

“They are forced to keep working with the same employer, despite the abuses, because they don’t want to return home with debts,” Meredith Stewart, an attorney from the Southern Poverty Law Center, said.

The non-profit organization has filed lawsuits on behalf of unprotected workers.

“There is progress, step by step, but there’s much to be done,” Stewart said, adding that after years of advocacy and efforts the U.S. Department of Labor has issued new regulations requiring minimum wages and that H-2 workers not be forced to pay for a promise that is not fulfilled. EFE