In October 2005, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin raised this question to a group of small business owners: “How do I make sure New Orleans is not overrun with Mexican workers?”

A significant Hispanic presence, from a variety of Latin American countries – not only from Mexico as Nagin suggested – is not a novel phenomenon to New Orleans or the gulf region. As many as 300,000 people of Hispanic descent were living in the areas most affected by Hurricane Katrina.

Rather, for the first time in public, the leadership of New Orleans is asking the same question that many “natives” of America are asking: “How do we make sure America is not overrun with Mexican workers?” New Orleans is in a state of crisis that once was a crisis of the black community only.

President Bush responded to this crisis by suspending parts of the New Deal-era Davis-Bacon Act that require workers employed by federal contractors to receive the prevailing regional wage. The Department of Homeland Security also announced on Sept. 6 that it would refrain for 45 days from initiating employer sanctions against those who hired workers without the proper documentation. These institutional responses facilitated large profit margins for no-bid government contractors such as Halliburton and Betchel, who are also major construction contractors in Iraq.

The priorities of our government are terribly clear. Some workers are refused payment for their dangerous work, and there are documented reports of immigrant workers living in squalor without food or clean water in trailers packed with 20 or 30 people each. It is the responsibility of subcontractors to house their workers.

Despite the evident criminality of these actions on the behalf of economic interests, it is the immigrant workers being marginalized as criminals whose mere presence in this country is both despised and exploited. Even the rhetoric of the war on terror is being applied to the realm of immigration policy. It is a known fact to business owners in the U.S. that their workers, who do not have proper papers, have no rights here other than to face abuse or go “home.”

I would like Mayor Nagin and other minority leaders to remember that, in this country, it does not matter if you are black or brown in a system that treats all minorities as second-class citizens worthy of second-class rights.

As Lolis Eric Elie of The Times-Picayune wrote in a recent column, Martin Luther King Jr. diagnosed the state of affairs that still exists today: “This is not a race war; it is now a class war.”

Sadly, in some ways, New Orleans has lost this battle.

Tim Tellez is a sociology senior from Little Rock, AR.