As Congress tackles immigration reform and resentment of laborers from Mexico swells, few are facing the real nature of the crisis.

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The labor shortage in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans has been so acute that the Department of Homeland Security recently suspended sanctioning employers that hired workers who couldn’t prove their residency.

A New York Times article published Nov. 10 revealed that some Louisiana employers were paying as much as $30 an hour to do salvage work because there simply weren’t enough workers.

And so like bees to honey, thousands of unauthorized immigrants from neighboring states raced to Louisiana to clean the filthy remains of the city and build it anew.

Meanwhile, most of the city’s former residents have been slow to return.

Some African-American leaders in Louisiana have nonetheless fretted openly about what the arrival of these Spanish-speaking laborers bodes for the future of New Orleans.

Bob Nielsen says that’s a natural enough reaction, just like the one most Americans are now feeling towards immigrant laborers spreading into their towns and counties across the nation.

The key to dealing with that, Nielsen says, is to talk about the issue without getting too worked up about it.

“We can’t pull back and lob insults at each other,” he says, “because that will get us nowhere.”

Blanca Zarazuago, a member of the Monterey County Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, says that besides vital labor, undocumented immigrants import something even more valuable.

“You have an urgency for success when you’re an immigrant,” said Zarazuago, a lawyer whose father came to the US under the Bracero program in the 1930s.

“Making that leap emotionally and geographically commits you to do the best you can. And that’s a type of motivation you don’t see in a lot of people these days, which is why employers hire them.”

Next week: Illegal Immigrants tell their stories.