Photo : Collected
The death of six Latino workers who were fixing potholes when a Baltimore bridge collapsed highlights the crucial role immigrants play in keeping America running, say advocates.
And it stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric of populists like Donald Trump, who cast them as criminal invaders ruining the country.
Migrants come and do the jobs that Americans don't want to do, said Luis Vega, an activist and former construction worker. The work is too hard, the hours are too long, or the conditions too difficult.
Who here wants to clean hotel rooms? Who wants to work under the hot sun? Who wants to be in the fields? said Vega.
A team of eight men were doing road maintenance overnight Monday into Tuesday on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when a huge container ship smashed into a support pillar, sending almost the entire span crashing into the Patapsco River.
Two were pulled alive from the water, but six died; brothers, husbands and fathers from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
Immigrants -- we get the job done," said senior White House adviser Tom Perez, himself a Latino.
The six people who perished, the two others who survived... this is America, the immigrants (were) repairing potholes.
The tragedy comes at a time many Latinos feel they are under assault from sections of the political class, as the United States ramps up for a bitter presidential election in November between Trump and incumbent Joe Biden.
Trump's stridently anti-immigrant campaign includes suggestions that, if elected, he will embark on a mass expulsion of people he blames for crime and drug addiction he says are wracking America.
The former president doesn't see how much damage he does with his poison, said Vega.
Terrorists don't sneak over the US-Mexico border; they fly in on a visa.
The people who pay traffickers to smuggle them across the hostile deserts of the US southwest are the people who end up doing the dirty and difficult jobs that Americans depend on.
In 2020, when we had the Covid pandemic... no one wanted to work closely with another person, said Vega.
So who did the work? The cleaning in the hospitals? Harvesting the food? It was the immigrants who risked their lives.
Messenger/Disha
