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When five immigrant workers fell to their death in October in a New York City scaffolding collapse, the root causes for this disaster were quite familiar to Newsday readers. Only three months earlier, a Newsday series about the exploitation to America's immigrant workers showed that New York suffers the nation's highest rate of immigrants killed on the job, and that more than 870 immigrant deaths around the nation during the late 1990s were never investigated by the government.
Immigrant workers are the invisible labor force in America's economy. Often performing jobs nobody else wants, usually for low pay, they are killed on construction crews: shot for cash as late-night store clerks, and crushed, impaled or electrocuted while working as landscapers. At a time when U.S. workplace deaths are generally declining, immigrant workers - many of them here illegally - are being killed on the job in ever greater numbers, especially the new wave of undocumented workers from Latin America and Asia.
Written in narrative form, the first day of the five-part Newsday series examined this growing national problem through the lives of two young men - both illegal immigrants from El Salvador - Why died, at a Long Island `garbage plant. In other parts of the series, the newspaper showed how government agencies have failed to enforce laws that would protect the health and safety of immigrants, and to provide timely compensation for victims and their families.
A tough story
For journalists with tighter deadlines and fewer resources, the task of "documenting the undocumented" - telling the story of this exploitation of immigrant workers - can be quite difficult. Newsday's 10-month project relied on hundreds of interviews and government documents, computer-- assisted reporting, and in-depth international reporting from El Salvador to expose one of the most blatant health and safety abuses in America's workplace today. But official records about these workers can be very hard to find. And family and friends may be unwilling to talk.
Here are some suggestions for investigative reporters of where to look and how you might tell the story of immigrant workers exploited and killed in your community:
Look at the number of immigrant deaths. In states with large immigrant populations - such as Florida, Texas, New York and California...