Will Bunch: A ship crashed into a Baltimore bridge and demolished the lies about immigration

[Nevilledog]

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/baltimore-bridge-collapse-immigrant-deaths-20240328.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/qoeGc


From the day in the mid-2000s that a then-20-year-old Maynor Yassir Suazo Sandoval crossed the border into America, he never stopped working. The youngest of eight children, Suazo was fleeing numbing poverty and a dead-end career path in Azacualpa, a small rural village in the western mountains of Honduras.

The undocumented Suazo wound up in greater Baltimore, a magnet for Central American refugees with its relatively cheap housing for the bustling Eastern Seaboard, a friendly climate toward migrants, and lots of opportunity. With American dreams of entrepreneurship, he took menial jobs like clearing brush, then launched a package delivery service, and — when COVID-19 ended that — started working overnight construction for a Baltimore contractor, Brawner Brothers.

Suazo was described by friends and family as happy, outgoing, and tireless. He had to be. While supporting a wife and two kids, he was also sending $600 to $800 a month back to Azacualpa, enough to help family members buy a small hotel and even support youth soccer. In Baltimore, he was what his brother called “the fundamental pillar” for a growing number of relatives who made it to Maryland. Home from the grueling construction work at 5 a.m., he was out working again by noon, picking up extra dollars cleaning yards, painting houses, or landscaping.

“He always told us that you had to triple your effort to get ahead,” the brother, Martín Suazo Sandoval, told the Associated Press from Honduras. “He said it didn’t matter what time or where the job was, you had to be where the work was.”

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