Natural disasters have unveiled tremendous systemic inequities affecting how undocumented immigrants receive aid for disaster preparedness and recovery.
Labor laws exclude most agricultural workers from historic worker protections, and policy reform to better protect workers remains stagnant. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed massive shortcomings in the nation’s labor and disaster aid systems, which have for decades failed to protect workers who come to the U.S. every year for seasonal work.
Each hurricane season, eastern North Carolina braces for the worst. But emergency planning, response and recovery efforts neglect a major marginalized population: rural Latinos. Without emergency alerts in their language or recovery support specific to community needs, immigrant workers and families navigate an emergency management system that fails to include them, putting their jobs and livelihoods on the line to survive a disaster and its aftermath.
