Many people depend on Santos Alvarado: his wife, their 5-month-old baby in New Orleans, and the couple's three other children living in his native Honduras. Alvarado has spent the last four years as a day laborer rebuilding homes destroyed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, sending money back to Honduras every month for his kids' tuition, food, clothes and other neccessities.

So last May when a construction contractor refused to pay Alvarado for more than a month's work, his life unraveled.  His landlord threatened eviction, and his children were forced to leave school. Alvarado confronted his boss. The contractor strung him along, he says, promising to pay Alvarado in a few days. But when payday arrived, the contractor was nowhere to be found, and the many voice messages Alvarado left on his boss's phone went unanswered. Finally, he spoke with his employer, who told Alvarado to go to a house on Frenchmen Street the next morning, where someone would bring him a check. Alvarado waited all day in front of the house. No one ever came.

  "I felt horrible," Alvarado says through an interpreter. "We were so desperate because the owner of the apartment we were living in gave us an ultimatum — she had given us only two more days to pay." The landlord kept her promise and kicked out Alvarado and his then-pregnant wife.

  The contractor committed what is commonly referred to as wage theft, and though it has existed in various forms in New Orleans for many years, studies indicate it has skyrocketed since the levee failures, paralleling the city's influx of immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented.

Eighty percent of New Orleans Latino immigrants surveyed for a 2009 study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization, reported not being paid for work performed. The findings mirrored the results of a Congress of Day Laborers survey, which interviewed 304 workers, 79 percent of whom reported wage theft. (click on link to read full story)