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.
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 accidental deaths are almost always preventable and often gruesome: Workers are impaled, shredded in machinery, buried alive. Some are 15 years old.
For the first such study of Mexican worker deaths in the United States, 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. Deaths peaked at 420 in 2001.
• 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 and Third World safety expectations don'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.
Meanwhile, Mexicans continue to die on the job.
Carlos Huerta, 18, fell to his death as he built federal low-income housing in North Carolina.
His bosses ignored basic work safety rules, according to state inspectors, when they put him in a trash container that wasn't secured to the raised prongs of a forklift. It soon toppled.
In 2002, the year Huerta was killed, 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, at 15 and 16, they might have attended. They were buried in a trench when the walls of sandy soil collapsed.
The United States offered these three teens wages 10 times higher than in Mexico. They offered their 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 glaringly perilous tasks, said Susan Feldmann, who fields calls from Spanish-speaking workers for an institute within the federal Centers for Disease Control.
"They're considered disposable," she said.
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.
Federal safety officials didn't fine the employer, though they did recommend fundamental changes in the work routine. A plant spokesman says that since the accident in 2000, workers wear larger protective tunics.
Mexican worker deaths also were concentrated in agriculture.
When Urbano Ramirez suffered a nose bleed 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.
Like Ramirez, many deceased workers came with little more than a grade-school education — and often left behind large families.
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.
During those years, the analysis showed, Mexicans were increasingly more likely to die on the job than U.S. workers of any race.
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.
Mexicans now represent about 1 in 24 workers in the United States, but about 1 in 14 workplace deaths.
The greatest frustration is that so many deaths are avoidable.
"Ninety-five to 99 percent of the time, there's going to be noncompliance with a standard that could have prevented the fatality," says Joe Reina, the No. 2 OSHA official for Texas and neighboring states and a leader of the Hispanic Taskforce.
And, language remains a barrier.
In its eight-state Southeastern region, OSHA has a single Spanish-speaking outreach worker. Marilyn Velez encourages workers and employers to avoid unsafe practices.
It's not easy. Some workers feel they don't need her.
"They are looking at you like, `Are you crazy? I have done worse things,'" Velez said. "It's just the way they see risk."