No Dignity in Life
Construction workers honored the Key Bridge victims during a press conference on March 29, 2024, at CASA's Baltimore worker center. They held white lilies and raised their hands in solidarity. Photo courtesy of Kaitlin Newman/The Baltimore Banner
The men who died in the Baltimore bridge collapse join hundreds of other migrant workers who’ve died toiling in unsafe and dangerous conditions on U.S. job sites
Editor’s note: This story originally ran in Prism.
Being an immigrant in the U.S. is a deadly job.
Americans were reminded of this when six immigrant workers were plunged into the cold waters of Baltimore’s Patapsco River after a 984-foot cargo ship hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge, causing its collapse in the early morning hours of March 26.
Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval, Miguel Luna, Jose Mynor Lopez, and Carlos Hernández would have had no idea what hit them. The crew on the ship issued an emergency mayday call before colliding with the bridge, but the workers who worked 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. filling potholes did not get any warning.
The men hailed from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Some were reportedly undocumented, and all of them are said to have sent remittances to their families in their home countries, the way that many “good” immigrant men do. Across the media, reporting on the workers’ deaths plays into every good immigrant trope that exists. The men were “generous,” “humble,” “hard working,” and died doing a job Americans “do not want to do.” These are well-meaning efforts to elicit empathy for immigrant workers in a country that usually has none.
‘There is simply nowhere to go in a country still stuck on debating whether immigrants are humans deserving of dignity and rights.’
When migrant workers die on U.S. job sites, they transform into “heroes.” Never mind that in life, they are subject to anti-immigrant laws that make it impossible to adjust their status, xenophobic rhetoric at the highest levels of government, and narratives that somehow paint them as both a drain on the economy and in the country to steal American jobs.
In Baltimore, these men had no safety net — literally. Across the U.S., undocumented and other migrant workers are forced to earn a precarious living — funneled into dangerous jobs because their immigration status limits their options to industries where they can work under the table, use a false identity, or contract with predatory staffing agencies that can skirt unjust immigration employment laws.
Despite having rights as workers, our undocumented “heroes” are denied workers’ compensation, Social Security, and unemployment, forcing them to remain in dangerous jobs — even when they are elderly. In fact, across the nation’s most dangerous industries — including forestry, construction, and agriculture — Latino immigrants account for disproportionate percentages of the labor force. Often, these immigrants have been in the U.S. for decades, and they get paid a pittance to address our nation’s most critical infrastructure needs. They pick and process our food, build our cities, and clean up after natural and manmade disasters — including the one that just robbed six young immigrants of their lives. But our reliance on these workers never seems to shift the conversation about whether they deserve even the most basic rights — like a warning call to alert them that a ship is about to slam into the bridge they are standing on.
‘For too long, our government has been at an impasse, wholly reluctant to address the unjust laws that subject migrant workers to disastrous and deadly conditions.’
In Florida, where immigrants battle sweltering temperatures in the triple digits to pick produce and build new high rises, legislators just made it illegal for local governments to pass “health and safety measures” for outdoor workers in extreme heat. In practice, this means lawmakers don’t think workers should have 10-minute rest breaks and access to water and shade to avoid heatstroke.
Immigrant children are not immune to America’s deadly lack of care and concern.
In the agricultural industry, the Department of Labor (DOL) allows children as young as 12 years old to legally work on farms across the U.S. State governments are also helping usher in a “child labor crisis” by loosening child labor protections. This includes a law signed by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders last year that allows 14- and 15-year-olds to work and removes the requirement that the state verify their age.
U.S. corporations and their contractors already illegally employ migrant children to work the night shift and perform some of the most brutal and dangerous jobs in the country. In Tennessee, the DOL discovered that migrant children as young as 13 were illegally employed to clean “head splitters” and “jaw pullers” in meat processing plants during overnight shifts. In Arkansas, where the DOL is investigating the use of migrant child labor at poultry plants owned by Tyson Foods and Perdue Farms, Huckabee Sanders’ law will serve only one purpose: providing American employers with low-cost labor performed by immigrant children.
The publicly catastrophic nature of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse is forcing us to consider — even if just for the span of the news cycle — how migrant workers are the life force of the American economy. Harder to reckon with is our government’s complete and utter failure to address the unjust employment and immigration laws that make immigrants vulnerable to deadly labor conditions in the first place.
Genesis, the small little girl in the construction worker vest, held a sign that said "Together We are Home" at the press conference honoring the Key Bridge victims at CASA's Baltimore worker center. Photo courtesy of Kaitlin Newman/The Baltimore Banner
Every day, migrant workers die gruesome and unnecessary deaths on U.S. job sites. These are men like Florencio Gómez Rodríguez, who drowned in a manure pit on a Wisconsin dairy farm; Josué Tiquiram, whose head was crushed by an industrial machine on a construction worksite in Massachusetts; and agricultural worker José Arturo González Mendoza, who, even when visibly suffering from heatstroke, was denied water and shade and was left to die alone on a bus in North Carolina. There is little recourse for the families these men leave behind, financial or otherwise.
In Maryland, more than $500,000 in charitable donations has been raised for the immigrant men who died working on the Baltimore bridge. These funds are crucial for the families who actually have a body to repatriate to their home country. Not only did they lose a loved one, but they also lost a primary breadwinner whose meager paycheck stretched across multiple households and countries.
Advocates are now calling on President Joe Biden to extend work permits to undocumented immigrants who have spent decades working in the U.S. I am not optimistic that the deaths of Hernandez Fuentes, Castillo Cabrera, Suazo Sandoval, Luna, Mynor Lopez, and Hernández will lead to systemic change. They should, but decades of migrant worker deaths and government inaction tell me otherwise.
For too long, our government has been at an impasse, wholly reluctant to address the unjust laws that subject migrant workers to disastrous and deadly conditions. And for what? Fear of falling out of favor with voters who often don’t know or understand their nation’s immigration laws? There is simply nowhere to go in a country still stuck on debating whether immigrants are humans deserving of dignity and rights.
All of us should want more and better for migrant workers than drowning in work trucks at the bottom of the Patapsco River because no one thought to tell them a ship would soon slam into them. Until then, I can only remain deeply ashamed to live in a country where migrant workers’ labor is extracted from them until their last breath, and it is only in death that they can rest.
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Prism is an independent and nonprofit newsroom led by journalists of color. We report from the ground up and at the intersections of injustice.
Tina Vasquez is a movement journalist with more than 15 years of experience reporting on immigration, reproductive injustice, food, labor and culture. Currently, she is the features editor at the nonprofit newsroom Prism, where in 2023 her 18-month investigation into abuse in the H-2A program with Futuro Investigates and Latino USA won the Journalism Collaboration of the Year Award from the Institute for Nonprofit News. In 2021, she was the recipient of a McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism and in 2020, she was named a Type Investigations Ida B. Wells Southern Fellow. Tina serves on the board of Press On, a Southern journalism collective that strengthens and expands the practice of journalism in service of liberation. She was born and raised in southeast Los Angeles and currently calls North Carolina home. @TheTinaVasquez
Other palabra stories by Tina Vasquez: The new Latino South, Only the Beginning, Childfree, at Great Cost