All work, no pay, makes George's day.(George W. Bush)

After Hurricane Katrina rained destruction on residents of the Gulf Coast, President Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act for the area. The act requires employers to pay local prevailing wages for labor used to complete government contracts. He also waived the requirement that mandated that government contract laborers must show that they are documented workers, not illegal immigrants. These actions combined to ensure that the Gulf Coast was flooded with illegal immigrants to do clean-up work. (Both actions were later rescinded, but it is likely the federal mandates are now largely being ignored in the hurricane area.)

President Bush got his wish. Even the contractors that work for Halliburton, the company formerly run by Vice President Cheney, which was awarded a major contract to repair Gulf Coast military facilities, have employed numerous undocumented workers.

The illegal immigrants are hired because they provide cheap labor. Reporters for Knight Ridder Newspapers found hundreds of them, living three or four to a room in a Best Western hotel in downtown New Orleans. That group was working for "LVI Services, an environmental remediation company based in New York."

Lest anyone errantly think that the illegal immigrants are being hired because no one else can be found to do the work, in early November, "75 union electricians ... [showed] off their termination letters from a job site at the Louisiana National Guard's Naval Air Station in Belle Chasse, south of downtown New Orleans. They said a contractor had sent 120 immigrant workers from Houston to replace them. Gary Warren, ... for the Louisiana Regional Carpenters Council, said his group had begun receiving regular complaints from union members ...