Deaths at work: who dies, how

Immigrants fill many high risk jobs, such as in construction, farming and convenience stores. The blog Confined Space does an invaluable service of listing all the work deaths the blogger, Jordan Barab, learns about. In his current posting he records 68 deaths from traumatic events. (Go down 1/3 of the way to “Weekly Toll.”) The majority of the deaths are from construction, logging, or farm accidents or by murder. Example of a murder: immigrant worker at a donut shop killed by robber. It’s not possible to know fully from his thumbnail descriptions how many were immigrants, legal or illegal.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that about 5,700 deaths are occuring at work each year. One researcher, Paul Leigh of UC Davis, estimates deaths at upwards of ten times that — by counting death from diseases such as the deaths of 400,000 Americans who have or are expected to die from asbestos-related conditions acquired at work, according to a RAND report.