Toughing it out in Big Easy

NEW ORLEANS

On Friday nights, day laborers form two lines at a bustling liquor store in the French Quarter.

One is to dutifully wire money to their homelands; the other is to buy $2.17 beers that medicate their lives in New Orleans.

“Life is hard here, harder than any place I’ve been in the U.S.,” said Jose Campos, 37, who came here from El Salvador by way of Florida. He pedaled his bicycle to Unique Grocery, a cavernous establishment off Bourbon Street that offers the money-wiring service through bulletproof glass and tall-boy beers from icy bins.

“It’s a dangerous place, a bad place,” he said. “But when you can find work, it’s all worth it.”

In the three years since Hurricane Katrina, immigrant laborers drawn to the construction and service industry jobs created by the storm’s destruction have transformed this rebuilding city. In an accelerated version of the already rapid Hispanic migration to the South, they are forging their own support networks, establishing businesses, packing churches and starting families - a process that usually takes a decade or more.

“There’s no place in the world like New Orleans in terms of how rapid the population change has been,” said Margie McHugh, co-director of immigration integration policy at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

But in a city whose infrastructure already lacked public services to support its pre-Katrina population, let alone a Spanish-speaking pilgrimage, they also have become preferred victims of the city’s infamous crime rate. And, far from wives and children, many have wrestled with the Big Easy temptations of alcohol and drugs.

“It’s always difficult to be a trailblazer, particularly at a time when New Orleans is still struggling to rebuild from an awful blow,” Miss McHugh said.

Since Katrina, the Hispanic population of New Orleans has risen from 15,000, or 3.3 percent of the pre-storm population, to 50,000, 15.2 percent of the current population, according to the New Orleans Economic Development office.

A 2006 study by Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley found that nearly half of the rebuilding work force was Hispanic. Fifty-four percent were working illegally in the United States, and nearly 90 percent of illegal workers lived in the United States before coming to town.

“By incorporating illegal immigrants into our normal institutions this way, we legitimize their status,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.

Beyond the statistics, there are the offices of Dr. Kevin Work, who has forged a business by delivering a generation of Hispanic children to the city: “Thirty to 40 deliveries a month,” he said.

Dr. Work was seeing so many Spanish-speaking patients at the hospital where he worked that he opened two prenatal offices with his own money. The doctor, who has hired bilingual staff and learned a few halting Spanish phrases himself, estimates that he has delivered more than 1,000 children from immigrant mothers since Katrina struck in August 2005.

The year before Katrina, Emergency Medicaid expenses were $1.7 million in metro New Orleans. It was the common childbirth benefit used by recent immigrants, but provided no prenatal care. This year, the program expanded to include prenatal care and five times as many patients, ballooning costs to $7.8 million.

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