Within days of New Orleans’ levees breaking and Mississippi’s coastline being washed into the sea, immigrant workers came into the hurricane-affected region en masse to seek work. Currently it is estimated that in New Orleans alone, the rebuilding workforce is nearly 50 percent Latino/a.

Immigrant workers, organizers, and service providers throughout the “Katrina Corridor” are coming together to collaborate strategically. With such a highly mobile workforce, we would like to develop ways to use that mobility to support and strengthen the leadership development and organizing done throughout the region. We also will discuss the ways in which we are using the provision of services as a way to link people into local organizing efforts, and the challenges faced by walking that line between the two. And we will highlight the ways in which the situation for immigrants in the disaster zone (and other parts of the South) is being examined and modified for export to the rest of the country.

Some of our key focal points include:
• the expansion of the guest worker program into national immigration “reform”;
• the increased harrassment of day laborers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as local police;
• the pitting of Latino/a and/or migrant workers against local people of color and the critical and innovative work being done to build alliances between African Americans and Latino/as;
• the criminally negligent conditions under which people are being forced to live and work;
• the huge impact of unsafe work practices on health (and the ways we are working to expand access to care in disaster zones where health care is limited for everyone, even the insured and the documented);
• the exclusion of immigrants from access to rights and services such as health care, WIC, shelters, worker’s compensation, living wages, health and safety regulations.

This workshop will be focused on the very particular circumstances in the Gulf Coast region, and yet will be addressing themes that immigrant rights organizations and health care providers across the country are dealing with; through popular education and small group discussion, we hope to learn from them and also to reveal the truth about the extreme circumstances in which we find ourselves struggling.

The workshop will be in English and Spanish, and we will provide interpreters.