A mixed blessing for immigrants - By Jay Root, Fort Worth Star Telegram
In one recent instance, 75 union electricians held a news conference to show 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 replaced them with 120 immigrant workers from Houston. A spokesman for the Louisiana National Guard, Neal Martin, said he hadn't heard of any such incident.
Gary Warren, the political director for the Louisiana Regional Carpenters Council, said his group is regularly getting complaints from union members laid off by contractors and replaced with immigrant workers.
'Nobody wants me to say this because it's not politically correct, but they are calling them 'Texans.' What they are really using is a lot of illegal labor,' Warren said. 'It's an issue of people who lost everything being laid off in favor of people from out of state.'