Baltimore Bridge Crash | The accident showed: The life of an immigrant is cheaper

They arrived to the country in the hope of a better life. Their lives ended in a job that is not suitable for others.

The catastrophic collapse of a freeway bridge in Baltimore on Tuesday has drawn attention to the background of the victims: All six of the dead were immigrants, even though immigrants make up less than a tenth of Baltimore's residents.

It still didn't surprise me.

Crash the victims were on the Baltimore beltway bridge patching potholes at the quietest possible time of day. At 1:28 a.m., a large container ship collided with a pillar and collapsed the entire central part of the bridge, approximately 750 meters long lattice structure. It fell into the water more than 50 meters below.

There were no motorists on the bridge because the police had time to stop traffic from both directions just before the cargo ship collided. One of the police officers announced on the authorities' radio frequency that he was going to drive to get the workers to safety, but the bridge collapsed less than ten seconds after his announcement.

All the dead were from Mexico or Central American countries, but they lived in the Baltimore area. Most of them had lived in the United States for twenty years.

Divers picked up the Mexican by Alejandro Hernández Fuentes and Guatemalan Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera bodies from the cab of a red pick-up truck from a depth of eight meters.

The four missing are presumed dead. Miguel Luna was from El Salvador, Jose Lopez from Guatemala and Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval from Honduras. The name of one of the victims has not been released publicly, but he is from Mexico, according to media reports.

“We are low-income families,” a co-worker of the deceased Jesús Campos told newspaper for The New York Times.

“Our relatives are waiting for our help in our homelands.”

of the United States Spanish is often spoken on construction sites, as immigrants from Latin America do jobs that few native Americans can do – whether it's the lower pay, the burden of the job description, or the inconvenient working hours.

Labor force statistics show that Latinos are overrepresented in fields with high accident rates. According to the news agency Reuters, 51 percent of them are construction workers, 34 percent are slaughterhouse workers and 61 percent are green area maintainers.

“We have so many dreams when we leave”, Maritza Guzman de Villatoro told newspaper for The Washington Post. He is from Honduras, the same area as the deceased Miguel Luna.

“Here, immigrants have the hardest conditions and the hardest jobs, and then we are the first to break.”

In March of last year, Guzmán de Villatoro's husband and five other road workers died After they were hit by a car on the Baltimore Ring Road.

Bridge accident it happened in the middle of the intensifying presidential campaign, where immigration is a hot topic.

Voters already consider immigration and border control to be the country's biggest problems. Incumbent president Joe Biden trying to control the record number of asylum seekers at the Mexican border, and trying to return to the White House Donald Trump has spoken of some of the arrivals as “animals” and “not people”. Trump has claimed that other countries are sending people from their prisons and mental hospitals to the United States.

“A lot of people don't appreciate our Latino community. They see us as animals or government pawns. But that's not true, we pay our taxes too,” a Mexican mechanic Carlos Crespo53, told Reuters.

of Baltimore the Latino population nearly doubled in the past decade. It was 4.2 percent of the population in the 2010 census and already 7.8 percent in the 2020 census.

The older brother of the deceased Guatemalan José López, who also lives in the region Jovani Lopez told to The New York Times that his little brother was happy with his job.

“But look at us now,” he said.

“I will leave this country soon. There is nothing here for me now. Nothing.”

Read more: Locals found it hard to believe that a huge bridge collapsed right next door: “I thought it was fake news”

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