>Washington Post: illegalen ziek na puinruimenTwin Towers

>Niet alleen in Nederland mogen illegalen de smerigste klusjes opknappen. Ook in de VS kent men de edele kunst der uitbuiting. Bij de instorting van de Twin Towers, op 11 september 2001, kwamen verschillende giftige materialen vrij, waaronder het dodelijke asbest.

Ondanks metingen die anders uitwezen, werd de lucht al naar enkele dagen “schoon” verklaard, en kon Wall Street worden heropend.

Brandweerlieden en andere hulpverleners bleven daarna maandenlang doorwerken om het puin op te ruimen. Daarbij werden ze overigens na weken nog geconfronteerd met gloeiend hete poelen van gesmolten staal onder het puin.

In de Washington Post een artikel over de vele illegalen, die hielpen bij het opruimen. En nu zonder zorgverzekering, zonder inkomen, zonder recht en zonder enige erkenning, doodziek geworden zijn…

Advocates Say Illegal Workers Suffer After 9/11 Cleanup

Jose Moncada watched the World Trade Center towers tumble, and, like so many Americans, felt a patriotic urge to help rescue survivors and rebuild after Sept. 11. “It was my time to put my hand on my heart,” he said. “It was my time to help somebody.”

It did not matter to him that he was an illegal immigrant from Honduras. And that did not seem to matter to supervisors who oversaw the retrieval of human remains and the removal of toxic debris at Ground Zero. They welcomed Moncada and thousands of other illegal immigrants, no questions asked.

Working on the pile for 10 days, Moncada breathed in thick dust, grainy asbestos and foul-smelling gases driven by an angry downtown wind. Now, five years later, he suffers from a hacking cough, nosebleeds, wheezing breath and life-threatening respiratory illnesses that also trouble thousands of legal U.S. residents who worked there.

No one knows how many illegal immigrants worked at Ground Zero in the days after Sept. 11. Immigration advocates claim it was thousands.

And now, as the workers have become sick, partisans on both sides cast their plight in moral terms.

“After 9/11, everybody responded with their heart,” said Carmen Calderón, coordinator of Sept. 11 immigrant outreach for the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health. “Immigrants died in those towers. They wanted to be part of the recovery of this nation.”

But when a backlash developed against the huge wave of illegal immigration, “they changed the DMV laws, and a lot of asbestos workers lost their licenses because they couldn’t get a picture ID,” Calderón said. “A lot of them are sick now, without work. They’ve lost their insurance. They lost their incomes. They lost everything.” Lees hele artikel

De daders en planners van 9/11 hebben, als ze eenmaal “brought to justice” zijn, héél wat slachtoffers te verantwoorden…