Who's Cleaning Up New Orleans?

They clear rotten seafood from stinking restaurant freezers, wash excrement from the floors of the Superdome, rip out wads of soaked insulation. The work is hot, nasty and critical to the recovery of New Orleans.

And yet, many of the workers are not actually from New Orleans.

Many of those engaged in the huge cleanup and reconstruction effort here — nobody has an exact count — are immigrants, both legal and illegal, from Mexico and Central America.

Meanwhile, as many as 80,000 New Orleanians sit idle in shelters around the country. They are out of work, homeless and destitute.

That irks some civic and union leaders.

"I've got nothing against our Hispanic brothers, but we have a whole lot of skilled laborers in shelters that could be doing this work," said Oliver Thomas, president of the City Council. "We could put a whole lot of money in the pockets of New Orleanians by doing this reconstruction work."

Roman Feher, an organizer with the Laborers Union, said: "It's really a shame. We're trying to get people back on their feet. The last thing we need is contractors bringing people in from out of state."

Mayor Ray Nagin added his voice to the chorus this week, telling local business people: "How do I ensure that New Orleans is not overrun by Mexican workers?"

With so many locals' jobs washed away with their homes and businesses, CBS News' Drew Levinson reports that being skilled in New Orleans has almost nothing to do with what job one is working right now.

Levinson spoke with one former mortgage broker who rushed for a job at a Rite Aide. She's not alone. Many of the applicants at retail and restaurant jobs in the Big Easy are over-qualified. Teachers are now grading beef.

That's because some residents are growing desperate. Kristen Anderson finally came home a few days ago. Her pet store job is gone.

"I need to bring in money for bills, of course, and I need something to do," Anderson told CBS News.

At the same time, interviews with some Katrina refugees suggest New Orleanians are in no big hurry to return for these jobs. In fact, many Katrina refugees have been landing jobs in communities around the country.

"Other guys out here in Houston and other areas of the state, we have better opportunities to make money here," New Orleans truck driver Wayne Cousin said at a refugee shelter in Houston.

And one restaurant owner told Levinson that he could open up 16 New Orleans restaurants tomorrow, if only he had 900 workers.

The situation in New Orleans is part of a controversial pattern seen across the country: Immigrants are often willing to do the dirty jobs many Americans won't take.

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., and Rep. William Jefferson, a Democrat who represents much of New Orleans, said they are trying to pressure federal authorities to ensure that government cleanup contracts use Louisiana labor. But private companies are free to hire outsiders, and state officials say they are powerless to do more than urge local hiring.

"Our position is, we want these businesses to hire Louisiana people first," said Ed Pratt, a spokesman for the Louisiana Labor Department. "If they are hiring out-of-state Hispanics, we can't control that."

The contractors insist they would be happy to hire locals but cite practical difficulties.

"When so many millions have evacuated, it's kind of hard to get people to return," said Pete Bell, the owner of Cotton, a Houston-based disaster recovery business that has more than 500 workers cleaning out hotels and restaurants.

On Wednesday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson decried the lack of local labor taking part in the cleanup and announced plans to remedy the situation by organizing a caravan of buses from Chicago next week to pick up displaced New Orleanians in St. Louis, Memphis and Jackson, Miss., and bring them back to the city. He suggested the workers could live on military bases and in hotels in and around New Orleans.

Labor investigators say that many of the workers in New Orleans are illegal immigrants who are being exploited and subjected to harsh living and working conditions.

An investigator with the Laborers Union, Rafael Duran, said that outside the New Orleans Arena, he had encountered Mexican teenagers perhaps 15 or 16 years old who had been removing excrement-fouled carpets.

While some cleanup workers in New Orleans are staying in hotels, Duran said the teenagers on the carpet-removal job told him they were sleeping in a field under a tent, and had gotten bitten by mosquitoes.

Duran said the laborers had been brought in by Rainbow International Restoration and Cleaning of Waco, Texas. A Rainbow franchise owner leading cleanup efforts in New Orleans, Vincent Beedle, said the workers had been brought in by a subcontractor that was supposed to obey all laws.

Outside a French Quarter restaurant, four Hispanic workers were taking a break from clearing 1,000 pounds of rotten shrimp from the freezer. The men, dripping with sweat, were wearing only jeans and T-shirts.

"You can just drive down the street and see people not dressed properly," Feher said. He said the workers cleaning the restaurants should have worn protective suits, rubber boots, rubber gloves and respirators.

The crew's New Jersey employer, Patrick Jones, said he provides protective gear for his workers as required by law, and "if I'm on the site they have to have it on." But he added: "I wasn't there."

Advocates said the lack of protective gear is leading to health problems. Juan Alvarez, director of the Latin American Organization for Immigrant Rights in Houston, said he recently took five or six workers to the hospital after they complained of respiratory problems and diarrhea upon their return from New Orleans.

In other developments, Louisiana's official death toll from Hurricane Katrina passed 1,000 on Friday.

The state Department of Health and Hospitals reported that state officials and local coroners had recovered 1,003 bodies, 15 more than the total reported Thursday. The increase puts the death toll from the storm at 1,242. Katrina killed 221 people in Mississippi, 14 in Florida, two in Georgia and two in Alabama.