NEW ORLEANS (By Arian Campo-Flores, Newsweek) November 27, 2005 — Only one day after Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf Coast, Tranquilino Jimenez already had a job offer. An undocumented immigrant from Mexico, he set off from his home in Mobile, Ala., to join a convoy of 80 other workers hired to rip out soggy carpets and tear down Sheetrock from Biloxi, Miss., to Port Arthur, Texas. He eventually settled in New Orleans, where he's cleaning up schools in St. Bernard Parish, east of the city. Earning $12 per hour, Jimenez, 40, works 10 hours a day, seven days a week, retiring at night to a dingy motel room crammed with four other Hispanic laborers. Asked how long he plans to stay in New Orleans, he replies, "As long as there's work."

Jimenez is one of thousands of Hispanics—both legal residents from other states and freshly arrived illegal immigrants from south of the border—who have rushed to New Orleans to take reconstruction jobs. They're prompting calls for a crackdown on undocumented workers—appeals echoed in cities nationwide that are wrestling with the day-laborer issue. If enough settle permanently, they will fundamentally remake the city's demographic and cultural landscape. Before Katrina, according to the 2000 Census, New Orleans was just 3 percent Hispanic and 67 percent African-American. After evacuating en masse, however, many blacks may have left for good. According to one survey of emergency shelters in Houston, 44 percent of respondents, who were almost uniformly black, had no plans to return. The potential outcome of these dual migrations: a much more Latin New Orleans. "This is a future San Antonio, Texas," says Scarlett Alaniz-Diaz, Hispanic liaison for the nearby city of Kenner.

The Hispanic influx has rankled many longtime residents, who say the arrivals have depressed wages in some sectors. "I'm working for $6 an hour!" yelled one African-American man at Mayor Ray Nagin's first town-hall meeting last month. "They're bringing in Mexicans and expecting us to work for the same money. Is slavery over, or what?" City leaders have decried contractors who hire out-of-state laborers rather than locals. Addressing a business forum in October, Nagin put the issue bluntly: "How do I ensure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?" After civil-rights groups denounced him, he clarified that he had meant only that residents should be hired first.

Not that the jobs taken by Hispanics are the envy of the industry. Milton Martins, an undocumented Brazilian working for a demolition company, complains of backbreaking work and abysmal living conditions—triple bunks packed into a stench-filled salon in a downtown hotel. "It's a trash dump," he says. "This is human slavery in America." Even worse, he says, the contractor hasn't paid some of his co-workers in full. If such conditions persist, Martins plans to head back home to Boston next month.

But even if many Hispanics leave, the city's Hispanic population seems destined to grow significantly. The new arrivals join an existing community with mostly Central American roots—one that, because of its meager size, lacks any elected officials of its own and has long felt shut out of the city's power structure. Now, community leaders hope that will change. "Politicians are going to start looking at us more seriously," says Ernesto Schweikert, general manager of a local Spanish-language radio station. "For people like me who love the city very much, it's like a new beginning." As it is, too, for newcomers like Tranquilino Jimenez.

With T. Trent Gegax