by Nicole Foy

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On the morning of Jan. 22, 2024, Elmer De León Pérez descended deep into the bowels of a ship that he was helping to build in Houma, Louisiana. Pérez was a welder, working to construct one of the U.S. government’s most sophisticated ships, an $89 million vessel for tracking hurricanes and conducting oceanographic research. It was funded by President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation.

Pérez’s assignment had him working at the bottom of a nearly 12-foot ballast tank, according to a subsequent police report; the walls were just 4 feet apart. That meant standing inside a metal cylinder, roughly twice the size of a household water heater, using an argon-gas torch whose flame can burn as hot as 20,000 degrees.

Something went very wrong that day. In the afternoon, workers noticed that Pérez, 20, had not come up for lunch. Friends and family began calling, with no answer.

His coworkers found him slumped over in the tank. “I couldn’t get to him because the gas was too strong,” one of them told ProPublica. “I started screaming, ‘Help! Help! Help!’”

When emergency workers found his body, Pérez was already showing signs of rigor mortis. A coroner’s report would note that he was wearing a red hoodie, plaid pajama pants and brown steel-toed boots, and that a “copious amount of clear fluid was noted to the mouth and nose,” as well as on the sleeve of his shirt. The coroner concluded that Pérez “died as a result of bilateral severe pulmonary consolidation and edema” — fluid in the lungs — and “copper and nickel intoxication.” (The ship, like many, used copper-nickel alloys as a coating because they resist corrosion from salt water.)

Pérez had worked for roughly the previous two years at the shipyard, which is owned by Thoma-Sea, a large employer with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. If employees are hurt or killed at work, they and their families are eligible for significant financial help. If one dies in an accident, for example, federal law requires companies such as Thoma-Sea to pay any surviving children. For an employee who perished the way Pérez did, that would have meant payments until his toddler son was at least 18, which could approach a total of $500,000.

But Pérez wasn’t working directly for Thoma-Sea; he was employed by a contractor. So when he died, Thoma-Sea paid nothing. Not to his family, including the partner that survived him. Not to his toddler son. Not even to help send Pérez’s body home to Guatemala. Instead, his family borrowed money and desperately tried to raise the rest online. Family members said they haven’t heard anything from Thoma-Sea since Pérez died.

When Pérez’s partner sought death benefits from G-4 Services, the local staffing contractor that had hired him to work for Thoma-Sea, G-4 rebuffed her. “Pérez was a self-employed independent contractor and thus a claim for death benefits is not compensable,” a lawyer for the company wrote in May. G-4 contends that Pérez “wasn’t working at the time of his death” even though his corpse was found in the ship with his welding equipment.

Investigators from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration concluded in a September report that Thoma-Sea committed multiple safety violations. “An employee was allowed to weld in a confined space that was not monitored for atmospheric changes while hot work was being done,” OSHA’s report stated. The site supervisor, the findings continued, “did not verify that the ventilation ductwork … was set up properly to maintain a safe atmosphere.”

The agency imposed a fine of $41,480 and then, after Thoma-Sea appealed, reduced it to $31,340. As with potential death benefits, none of that money went to Pérez’s family.

For decades, U.S. politicians have blamed immigrants for all manner of national woes, particularly taking American jobs. These days, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump agree on the need for a border clampdown.

But the truth about jobs is more complicated. There is a dire shortage of blue-collar workers in the United States. Skilled tradespeople have been aging out of the workforce for years now, with fewer people to replace them, as students have prioritized four-year college degrees. The Biden administration has pumped millions into development programs to lure young people into trades, but it’ll take years to see any effects.

Today the lack of welders is acute. The U.S. needs at least 300,000 more of them in the next few years. Shipyards have been hit particularly hard by the gap, which has contributed to a shortfall in warship production.

As in many other industries, immigrants are filling that gap.

Pérez embodied many aspects of the immigration debate. He had exactly the skills that American companies are desperate for. He was an expert welder, willing to work in the cramped, dangerous spaces inside ships. And Pérez was able to earn $23 an hour at a shipyard in Houma, many times more than he could in his home country. Slightly built with jet-black hair, Pérez was funny, diligent and eager to succeed. He had begun building a life in the U.S.

But, like millions of others, Perez had not been able to do that legally. This spring, the secretary of Navy, Carlos del Toro, called for creating exactly such a pathway, to help construct the ships the Navy needs. “What we’ve got to do is open up the spigot a bit,” he said. “Allow blue-collar workers to come here.”

Without a work permit, Pérez was vulnerable. He worked at the shipyard but not for it, a contractor for a subcontractor.

Pérez’s story is emblematic of a system that relies ever more on immigrants,........

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