Hundreds of illegal migrants are being killed on construction sites around the nation, marking another hidden cost of President Joe Biden’s progressive welcome for cheap migrant labor.
“Foreign-born Hispanic or Latino workers accounted for 63.5 percent (792) of total Hispanic or Latino worker fatalities (1,248),” in 2022, according to a December release by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Fatalities in the construction industry accounted for 316 [or 40 percent] of the 792 foreign-born Hispanic or Latino worker deaths in 2022.”
The government department will not issue death data for 2023 until after the 2024 election.
Media coverage of the 719 deaths among working illegal immigrants has been minimal — especially in comparison to the media’s coverage of the “kids in cages” faux border scandal during President Donald Trump’s four years.
But the huge death toll among illegal migrants was spotlighted by a left-wing publication, InThesetimes.com:
“When we come to this country, we want to make money, so we get into sketchy situations,” says Sanchez, who worked for about 15 years in the South since coming to the United States. He has worked at places where they asked for papers and where they didn’t. And that has meant taking jobs where he can slip by. “When we try to work with [white] Americans, there, they ask for a good Social Security card, and if we don’t have one, we die of hunger,” he says.
So, too, some are teens working in dangerous jobs, like Duvan Tomas Perez, a 16-year-old from a rural Guatemalan village, who died last July, while working on the regular cleaning crew in a Mar-Jac Poultry plant in Hattiesburg, Miss. U.S. law bars youths under 18 years old from working in hazardous workplaces.
However, the magazine pushed a race-based perspective that downplayed Biden’s policies, as well as the legal and moral distinctions between illegal migrants and Americans:
Overall, Latino workers tend to be younger and less experienced, lack training in the job, earn lower wages and work for small outfits, researchers say. They often take jobs in sectors that others avoid. For example, Latino workers make up 55.5% of the nation’s roofers, which had the highest fatality rate in the construction industry in 2020.
Biden’s deputies are trying to improve workplace safety for illegals by encouraging their participation in unions, so causing further wage losses for ordinary Americans.
The article was also silent about the thousands of dead migrants — male and female, adults and children — who are lured to their deaths by Biden and his deputies. Those deputies, including Biden’s impeached border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, import more workers to please his party’s donors even as they portray President Donald Trump’s safer border policy as immoral.
A few GOP politicians have begun to spotlight Biden’s rising death toll.
“Migrants died in this journey coming here because Joe Biden told them to surge to our border and come into our country,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told a March 7 hearing held by the House Committee on the Judiciary. “What’s the solution? Seems to me we call timeout,” said Jordan, chairman of the judiciary committee.
But Democrats dismiss the death toll, even as they slam Republicans for detaining migrants.
“Our economy needs more workers,” Rep. Deborah Ross (D-NC) told the March hearing. “Migrants accept the costs and risks of journeying to the United States because they understand that their labor is in demand here and that employment will be easy to come by.”
Democrats and the U.S. media also say little about the mass rapes and sexual violence committed against migrants on their way to Biden’s welcome. On April 4, however, the New York Times posted an article from their correspondent in South America:
Assault, robbery and rape have long been a grim risk of migrant journeys around the globe. But aid groups working in the Darién Gap say that in the past six months they have documented an extraordinary spike in attacks, with patterns and frequencies rarely seen outside of war zones.
…
In January and February, Doctors Without Borders recorded 328 reports of sexual violence, compared with 676 in all of 2023. This year, 113 came in a single week in February.
“The level of brutality is extreme,” said Luis Eguiluz, the organization’s director in Colombia and Panama.
The article was closed to commenters.
Many illegal migrants also die from workplace accidents in GOP-run regions such as Texas, InTheseTimes.com noted:
Texas is one of the most lethal states for Latino workers and recorded 269 deaths in 2022, up from 211 in 2016. Latino people make up 40% of the state’s population, but they accounted for 47% of workers killed on the job in 2022.
The 792 confirmed migrant deaths are a small share of the rising number and rate of workplace deaths under Biden. The BLS reported:
There were 5,486 fatal work injuries recorded in the United States in 2022, a 5.7-percent increase from 5,190 in 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today … The fatal work injury rate was 3.7 fatalities per 100,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) workers, up from 3.6 per 100,000 FTE in 2021.
Many of the workplace deaths were caused by murderers or dangerous drivers, echoing the massive spike amid the Democrats’ Black Lives Matter campaign against policing. The BLS noted:
Almost a quarter (24.6 percent) of fatalities due to homicides occurred while a worker was tending a retail establishment or waiting on customers.
…
Roadway incidents involving motorized land vehicles increased 9.3 percent between 2021 and 2022, leading to a series high of 1,369 fatalities. Pedestrian vehicular incidents were down 3.6 percent in 2022 with 325 fatalities, which is the lowest number of fatalities since 2018.
The rate of workplace suicide also jumped sharply under Biden. “Suicides increased 13.1 percent to 267 fatalities in 2022″ after decreases in 2020 and 2021,” the BLS reported.
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