Jose loves Biloxi, Miss. It reminds him of his native Veracruz in Mexico: the ocean breeze, the fresh seafood and the beautiful vegetation. The Mexican immigrant went to Mississippi from Oklahoma last November hoping to take advantage of the post-Hurricane Katrina rebuilding opportunities. It didn’t take long for him, three of his brothers and his son to find jobs at a roofing company, and soon after that came another job that paid even better.

Then he met Paul at a Laundromat. The pastor/contractor offered him the ideal job: steady work, good pay and spiritual guidance. As a Christian, for Jose it was a job sent from heaven. Or at least it seemed that way at the time.

“For seven months, I did the work I was asked to do. One house after the other, I fixed roofs, put up Sheetrock, whatever was necessary to repair houses damaged by the hurricane,” said the man who would prefer to remain anonymous. “There were times when we worked on several houses at the same time.” But many of those jobs went either unpaid or underpaid.

The excuses were many: The job had to be redone. They had to wait for inspections. The homeowners were not paying the bills. “Sometimes the pastor would tell me he didn’t remember offering to pay me a certain amount,” Jose claimed. As a result, the 62-year-old roofer endured hardship, unable to pay his rent at times and going without food at others. He claims he is owed between $30,000 and $40,000.

“Like him, there are thousands,” said Vicky Cintras, a coordinator for the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), an organization that defends immigrants’ rights in the area. The privately funded group hired Cintras, an outspoken advocate for immigrants’ rights, to look after the immigrant community affected by Hurricane Katrina.

What she has found in the past year is both the abuse of storm victims and the exploitation of immigrant workers helping to rebuild. She has been trying to persuade Jose’s former employer to pay up. She has a good track record.

Only in Mississippi, MIRA has been able to recuperate more than $730,000 in salaries not paid to immigrants, including payment for overtime. “There are no labor laws in Mississippi, so we follow federal regulations, which are difficult to enforce at the state level,” Cintras said. That makes it very easy to exploit workers and hope they don’t have the time and money to defend themselves, especially people like Jose, who is undocumented.

But undocumented workers are not the only immigrants exploited by their employers in the Gulf region. A lawsuit was filed last week on behalf of guest workers from all over Latin America who were recruited by the hundreds to help in the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina.

The lawsuit against Decatur Hotels alleges that the guest workers were promised steady work, fair pay and decent living conditions. Many of them had to make serious sacrifices, including leaving their families behind, in order to pay hefty amounts to their recruiters for the cost of their working visas. But their sacrifices apparently have not paid off.

Lawyers for the immigrant workers say they were unable to earn enough money to repay their debts. The workers are also unable to take on second jobs or look for better-paying ones because they would be in violation of their visas. The company denies any wrongdoing.

Legal or not, immigrants who were either lured to the area or tried to take advantage of what seemed like good job opportunities have fallen victim to what Cintras calls “equal-opportunity exploiters.” Some of them put up with it, while others seek justice.