This was the humorous spin the indefatigable market-supremacist Australian blog Dissecting Leftism placed this morning on a recent Reuters story:

Immigrants find opportunity in ruined New Orleans 23 Dec 2005 - By Jeff Franks:

"...immigrants, most of them illegally in the United States, have swarmed in to do the hard work of cleaning up and rebuilding that others so far have shunned...there is a huge unfulfilled demand for labor and, as a result, high wages they cannot get in their homeland or in other U.S. cities...they crowd street corners starting at daybreak, offering themselves as day laborers to anyone who needs them...."Baby, we couldn't do it without them," one of the employers shouted through his truck window...The pay is good — "$10, $12, $15 an hour," said Jose Del Rio, 38, from Chihuahua, Mexico — and there are few problems...so far, the authorities have not been too difficult. Local police do not hassle them and immigration agents come around only occasionally, more a nuisance than a danger."

Dissecting Leftism closes by quoting the end of the Reuters story:

"When asked where the American workers were, Del Rio shook his head and said, "Who knows? It just seems like the Latin race likes to work more."

From this one gathers that one can be rude about blacks in Australia in a way not now allowed about Asians or Arabs.

But Dissecting Leftism is quite unfair to New Orleans blacks (and whites too, for that matter). Any citizen accepting "$10,$12, $15 an hour" on the cash basis implied by the story would be liable for tremendous problems from the IRS, the Health Insurance and the Social Security bureaucracies. To clear what these Mexicans are netting, he would have to get perhaps $5 an hour more (which no one is offering). Plus turning up on a street corner with "sometimes as many as 200" Mexicans and offering to compete with them for work is likely to be extremely unhealthy.

The native-born, in other words, are being undercut by foreigners who are evading income tax, health insurance and social security obligations (and of course , in effect stealing health services if they need them). This is being aided and abetted by the local business community and connived at by the local political establishment.

Obviously, a large measure of contempt is due to profiteering local businessmen imitating, as my brother recently said, a "blind, selfish, savage shrew".

But what can one say about the much-storied New Orleans black political leadership, headed by Mayor Ray Nagin, valiant in denouncing President Bush when they had the entire MSM at their back, but now rapidly falling silent rather than challenge the prospering New Orleans construction lobbies in the interests of their own people?

Maybe it will be a small comfort to the victims, given where most New Orleans evacuees have gone, that this time they are being sold up, rather than down the river.