DYING TO WORK
The jobs that lure Mexican workers to the United States are killing them in a worsening epidemic that is now claiming a victim a day, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Though Mexicans often take the most hazardous jobs, they are more likely than others to be killed even when doing similarly risky work.
The death rates are greatest in several Southern and Western states, where a Mexican worker is four times more likely to die than the average U.S.-born worker.
These deaths are almost always preventable and often gruesome: Workers are impaled, shredded in machinery, buried alive.
For the first such study of Mexican worker deaths in the United States, The AP talked with scores of workers, employers and government officials and analyzed years of federal safety and population statistics.
Among the findings:
- Mexican death rates are rising even as the U.S. workplace grows safer overall. In the mid-1990s, Mexicans were about 30 percent more likely to die than native-born workers; now they are about 80 percent more likely.
- Deaths among Mexicans in the United States increased faster than their population. As the number of Mexican workers grew by about half, from 4 million to 6 million, the number of deaths rose by about two-thirds, from 241 to 387.
- Though their odds of dying in the Southeast and parts of the West are far greater than the U.S. average, fatalities occur everywhere: Mexicans died cutting North Carolina tobacco and Nebraska beef, felling trees in Colorado and welding a balcony in Florida, trimming grass at a Las Vegas golf course and falling from scaffolding in Georgia.
- Even compared with other immigrants, what's happening to Mexicans is exceptional in scope and scale. Mexicans are nearly twice as likely as the rest of the immigrant population to die at work.
Why is all this happening?
Public safety officials and workers themselves say the answer comes down to this: Mexicans are hired to work cheap, the fewer questions the better.
They may be thrown into jobs without training or safety equipment. Their objections may be silent if they speak no English or are here illegally. And their work culture doesn't discourage risk-taking.
Federal and state safety agencies have started to recognize the problem. But they have limited resources -- only a few Spanish-speaking investigators work in regions with hundreds of thousands of recent arrivals -- and often can't reach the most vulnerable workers.
President Bush's proposal to grant illegal immigrants temporary legal protections energized the national immigration debate. Yet in these discussions, job safety has been an afterthought.
Ignoring basic safety rules
Eighteen-year-old Carlos Huerta fell to his death in 2002 as he built federal low-income housing in North Carolina.
His bosses ignored basic safety rules, according to inspectors.
That year, more Mexicans died in construction than any other industry.
A year ago in South Carolina, brothers Rigouerto and Moses Xaca Sandoval died building a suburban high school that the boys, at ages 15 and 16, might have attended.
The United States offered these teens wages 10 times higher than in Mexico. They offered employers cheap, pliant labor. For safety violations that led to these deaths, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has fined employers $50,475.
Accidents like these suggest that employers assign Mexicans to the most perilous tasks, says Susan Feldmann, who fields calls from Spanish-speaking workers for an institute within the federal Centers for Disease Control.
"They're considered disposable," she says.
But employers are not always at fault, some safety officials say.
Though he was trained and wearing required safety gear, Jesus Soto Carbajal severed his jugular vein with a carving knife in a Nebraska meatpacking plant. The blade punctured his chest just above the protective mesh.
Mexican worker deaths were also concentrated in agriculture. When Urbano Ramirez suffered a nosebleed picking North Carolina tobacco, his supervisor prescribed shade rest. Ramirez's body was found 10 days later. A medical examiner said he died of unknown natural causes, the body too decomposed for a definitive finding. His brother suspects heat stroke.
The AP's investigation focused on 1996 through 2002, the most recent set of worker death data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those were years when the economic boom coaxed about 1 million Mexicans beyond the border states, according to government estimates.
During those years, Mexicans were increasingly more likely to die on the job than U.S. workers.
The annual death rate for Mexicans increased to the point that about 1 in 16,000 workers died. Meanwhile, for the average U.S.-born worker, the rate steadily decreased to about 1 in 28,000.
Workplace fatalities had distinct regional patterns:
California and Texas: These states, where generations of Mexicans have developed strong support networks, still rank atop the annual number of Mexican worker deaths -- but their numbers have steadied or fallen recently.
South: From Louisiana to Maryland, the Mexican death rate averaged about 1 in 6,200 workers -- four times that of native-born workers.
West: Outside California, death rates hovered above the national average.
Midwest: The number of Mexicans killed annually doubled between 1996 and 2002.
Northeast: The region has the fewest Mexicans, but death rates still far exceeded American worker averages.
