The Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization, has released a new study regarding immigration and American jobs. This study was done by matching census data with state and federal employment data. What did they find? The huge increase in immigration since 1990 has not hurt Americans' prospects for employment. They found no evidence that immigration increases have led to higher unemployment among Americans.
In 2000, there were 28 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the United States. This was a 61% rise from 1990. By 2004, the figure was 32 million. Rakesh Kochhar, author of the study, said other factors, such as economic growth, played a much larger role than immigration in determining job availability in the U.S.
The report said immigrants tend to be younger and less educated than workers in the U.S., but said they found "no apparent relationship between the growth of foreign workers with less education and the employment outcome of native workers with the same level of education."
The study did not address the impact of immigration upon wages. Many believe the masses of immigrants willing to work for very little, has depressed the wages of American workers. In other words, getting a job is no harder because of immigration, but getting a job with good pay is harder. Something is certainly acting to depress wages in this country. Personally, I think it has more to do with outsourcing of jobs and naked corporate greed, and these will be problems whether there are large numbers of immigrants or not.
This study is clearly wrong. In the early seventies and the eighties for instance many, many of the skilled construction workers including carpenters, electricians, and brick masons, just to name a few were American citizens. These jobs, although 'vocational track' jobs, are decent honest jobs for hardworking Americans. You would be hard pressed to come to Houston and find many citizens at these jobs. So they are not unemployed: that simply means that they were driven out and found jobs in other sectors and or other regions. In the event that terrorism or the world petrochemical market or any other factor causes disruptions in this great economy that we have now, there will be much hardship for all American citizens as they 'recompete' for these jobs in a scarce labor market. Our socialized safety nets will be severely strained if not severed completely.
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