Rebuilding New Orleans after the destruction brought by Hurricane Katrina was not an easy task but some Latinos signed up for it in the hope that they will be properly compensated. But 10 years after the catastrophe, a number of workers have yet to receive the payment for their services.

The place needed serious efforts of rebuilding and Latinos were promised that there will be a lot of work waiting for them for a high pay, as per NBC News.

But the only real thing about the promise was the ton of work and not the high pay. 

"The word was that there was a huge demand for workers to help with the reconstruction efforts," said Honduras immigrant Santos Alvarado, who left Texas for New Orleans before year 2005 ended to remodel residential houses in the storm-battered place.

The government reportedly "allowed federal contractors to hire undocumented workers to help meet the demand," added NBC News.

But these contractors, according to Alvarado, "could not be trusted" since they promised to pay them after completing the job but never lived up to their word.

"We called him when we were done with the house, but he didn't answer. He ended up owing us a total of $12,000 for the work that we did for about a month," he added.

In addition, Congress of Day Laborers community organiser Fernando Lopez mentioned in a Fox News report that most of the Latinos who worked really hard to bring New Orleans back to its feet became victims of exploitation.

"However essential their labor might have been, these workers were victims of many abuses and injustices, like having their wages stolen, exploitation by labor contractors, exposure to toxic materials, discrimination and persecution by various police agencies, as well as the massive deportation of hundreds of them," Lopez explained.

He added that the Latinos have even doubled their presence in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina but most of them still fall victims to "brutal exploitation of workers and racial discrimination by different government agencies."

According to BBC, all these employment problems and what the people tagged as "slow response" after the disaster, which killed about 2,000 people and left a million people homeless, haunted former President George Bush's administration.

But during his visit at the Warren Easton Charter High School on Friday morning, a decade after the destruction, the former president commended the "resurgence" of the school system in the area.

"Because of the success schools like this have achieved, it gives a message to Americans that New Orleans is back, and better than ever," Bush was quoted as saying.