Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn’t understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops.
Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. “I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work,” Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.
....
“They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one,” Martinez said.
He says that Tovar “kicked us off the base,” forcing him and other cleanup workers—many of them Mexican and undocumented—to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly owed more than $56,000 by Tovar.
I wonder why Bush and McCain are pro illegal labor?
I wonder how many illegals KBR has imported since 2005 when this happened?