President Bush's recent proposal to grant illegal immigrants temporary legal protections energized the national immigration debate. Yet in these discussions, job safety has been an afterthought. Meanwhile, Mexicans continue to die on the job.

Hazardous conditions

Eighteen-year-old Carlos Huerta fell to his death as he built federal low-income housing in North Carolina.

His bosses ignored basic work safety rules, according to state inspectors, when they put him in a trash container that wasn't secured to the raised prongs of a forklift. It soon toppled.

In 2002, the year Huerta was killed, more Mexicans died in construction than any other industry — and more died from fatal falls than any other accident.

A year ago in South Carolina, brothers Rigouerto and Moses Xaca Sandoval died building a suburban high school that, at 15 and 16, they might have attended. They were buried in a trench when the walls of sandy soil collapsed.

The United States offered these three teens wages 10 times higher than in Mexico. They offered their employers cheap, pliant labor. For safety violations that led to these deaths, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has fined employers $50,475.

Accidents like these suggest that employers assign Mexicans to the most glaringly perilous tasks, says Susan Feldmann, who fields calls from Spanish-speaking workers for an institute within the federal Centers for Disease Control.

"They're considered disposable," she says.

But employers are not always at fault, some safety officials say.

Though he was trained and wearing required safety gear, Jesus Soto Carbajal severed his jugular vein with a carving knife in a Nebraska meatpacking plant. The blade punctured his chest just above the protective metal mesh. Federal safety officials didn't fine the employer, though they did recommend fundamental changes in the work routine. A plant spokesman says that since the accident in 2000, workers wear larger protective tunics.

Mexican worker deaths were also concentrated in agriculture.

When Urbano Ramirez suffered a nose bleed picking North Carolina tobacco, his supervisor prescribed shade rest. Ramirez's body was found 10 days later. A medical examiner said he died of unknown natural causes, the body too decomposed for a definitive finding. His brother suspects heat stroke.

Like Ramirez, many deceased workers came with little more than a grade-school education — and often left behind large families.

Criminal charges are rare, fines more typical. One exception is a California dairyman who faces involuntary manslaughter charges after two of his workers drowned in liquid cow manure.