Some 300,000 Latin Americans are among those who have been displaced from their jobs and homes by Katrina, and if the hurricane made the poor in America visible, immigrants are its invisible victims.

Tens of thousands are still missing. The stories that have made the newspapers are the stories of those who got out.

When the wife of a Guatemalan house painter in New Orleans woke him with the news that the mayor was urging everybody to get out, his first words were, "How are we going to go? We don't have any money."

The Washington Post interviewed them in Baton Rouge, where they ended up. They borrowed the money, and with friends "they formed a caravan of five rickety cars," the Post reported, "one of which broke down en route." They are now working at whatever jobs they can get, just to hold on to their motel room. "It's all we have right now."

And those who were not so lucky? According to the Associated Press, "immigrants fearing deportation ... are not seeking help at shelters because officials are asking for Social Security numbers in order to enter."

Catch-22

You'd think the federal government would set aside its attack on "illegal" workers in the aftermath of Katrina. No such luck. When one such immigrant went to get food stamps, the Wall Street Journal reported that she was told, "No green card, no help."

Terrified by streets full of police and troops, even those who get into shelters hang back when the aid agencies set up to dispense debit cards, food stamps, unemployment payments, mail. And with reason. In El Paso, some have been summoned to deportation hearings. In West Virginia, others have been arrested.

At first, the Department of Homeland Security urged illegal immigrants who were hurricane victims to come in and get help, playing coy as to whether they would be rounded up and deported later on. But later, the Washington Post reported, DHS announced outright that "information provided by illegal immigrants seeking federal aid could be used against them later."

Even those in the country legally can be living in a grotesque Catch-22. The visa of a Jamaican guestworker in Mississippi requires him to work for a casino that no longer exists. His aging parents depend on his checks. Will the company find him other work? "No one from the company has even checked to see if their workers who are stranded here are okay," he told the New York Times.

Though the U.S. government has harassed, misled, or abandoned these workers, their own governments have not. They have been on the scene, setting up mobile consulates and handing out cash and airplane tickets for those who wanted to head home.

But they, too, are being hampered by Washington. "It is very difficult for us to find and identify the Latin American victims and to reach them with assistance," the Honduran ambassador told the Inter Press Service News Agency. "The U.S. State Department has so far placed restrictions on the efforts that we could make."

Cheap Labor

And immigrant refugees weren't the only ones to suffer from the Bush administration's rebuff of their offers of help. So have the rest of the Americans that the federal government has left in the lurch.

Bush did let a small contingent of the Mexican army cross the border to help hurricane refugees who had come to San Antonio, where it set up a food kitchen and a medical tent. But he refused aid offered by Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Cuba, and Venezuela. Cuba alone offered 1,500 doctors and medical supplies.

Many of these countries have firsthand experience coping with hurricanes, most recently with Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Besides that, they also know what it means to be poor. And in Cuba and Venezuela, the poor actually run the government, reason enough for the likes of Bush not to want them in the country.

One of the homeless and jobless immigrants interviewed by the New York Times had come to Mississippi to rebuild after Hurricane Ivan last year. Now he and others like him will be used to rebuild after Katrina. Because they are desperate, they will work cheap. To make that official, Bush has invoked "emergency powers" to void the law that keeps the government from undermining local wages, the Davis-Bacon Act.

Davis-Bacon requires that workers be paid the average local wage on all federally funded construction projects. But undermining local wages is exactly what Bush intends to do. Already, one of the biggest, most politically well-connected property owners in New Orleans is reported to be trucking in cheap labor in from out of state.

In effect, these "compassionate conservatives," capitalist to the core, are going to use people's misery to make themselves richer. They will use every means at their disposal to maximize the misery of immigrant workers, particularly those without papers, so they can minimize their own labor costs. And then they will ask you and me to think that these people are putting something over on us because they are working for peanuts.

America is a land of immigrants. The ancestors of the Bushes and the rest of the capitalist power elite were immigrants. They killed off the native peoples who owned the land, enslaved Africans to work it, and brought in impoverished Europeans to labor in their factories. That's how they got their wealth. That's how they got their power. What's happening after Katrina is nothing new.

What would be new is if we stopped them.