The Racial Blame Game: Immigrants Are Not the Cause of High Unemployment Among Minority Workers (829 hits)
See the IPC fact sheet summarizing the best data available on the impact that immigration has on employment and wages below:
(IPC Fact Check, March 1, 2011)
March 1, 2011
Washington D.C. - Today, the House Immigration Policy and Enforcement Subcommittee is holding a hearing entitled "Making Immigration Work for American Minorities." Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, some are still trying to make the claim that deporting millions of unauthorized immigrants would free up jobs for unemployed American workers, and minority workers specifically.
However, the best available evidence suggests that there is no correlation between high levels of immigration and high unemployment among native-born workers.
-If immigrants took jobs away from large numbers of minority workers, one would expect to find higher minority unemployment rates in those parts of the country with larger numbers of immigrants. Yet data from the 2009 American Community Survey, analyzed for the IPC by Rob Paral and Associates, indicate that there is no correlation between the size of the foreign-born population and the African American unemployment rate in U.S. metropolitan areas {Figure 1}.
-African American unemployment rates in many low-immigration cities are far higher than in many high-immigration cities. For instance, immigrants were 17.6 percent of the population in Miami in 2009, but only 3.1 percent of the population in Toledo. Yet the unemployment rate for African Americans in Toledo (30.1 percent) was much higher than that of African Americans in Miami (17.6 percent).
-According to Yale University economist Gerald D. Jaynes, the impact on less-educated native-born workers of competition with immigrant workers ¡°is swamped by a constellation of other factors (such as declining factory jobs and other blue-collar employment).¡±
-Manuel Pastor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, concludes that ¡°in the policymaking process, the small size of immigration¡¯s impact on the labor market must be kept in perspective.¡± There are many other, far more significant factors contributing to unemployment and low wages among African American men in particular, such as ¡°the rising level of skill requirements of jobs, racial discrimination, and spatial mismatch between the location of employment opportunities and residential locations of blacks.¡± Immigrants are not the cause of low wages for minority workers.
-The most recent economic research indicates that immigration produces a slight increase in wages for the majority of native-born workers. This occurs in two ways. First, immigrants and natives tend to have different levels of education, work in different occupations, and possess different skills. The jobs which immigrants and natives perform are frequently interdependent. This increases the productivity of natives, which increases their wages. Second, the addition of immigrant workers to the labor force stimulates investment as new restaurants and stores open, new homes are built, etc. This increases the demand for labor, which exerts upward pressure on wages.
-The wage increase which native-born workers experience as a result of immigration is very small, but it is an increase. A 2010 report from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that, from 1994 to 2007, immigration increased the wages of native-born workers by 0.4 percent. The impact of recent immigration on native-born wages varied slightly by the race, educational attainment, and gender of the worker.
-Native-born African Americans experienced an average wage increase of 0.4 percent, nearly the same as the 0.5 percent increase among native-born whites.
-College graduates saw an increase of 0.4 percent; workers with some college 0.7 percent; high-school graduates 0.3 percent; and workers without a high-school diploma 0.3 percent.
-Native-born men with only a high-school education or less experienced a 0.2 percent wage decline, while native-born women with the same level of education saw an increase of 1.1 percent.
-Only foreign-born workers experienced significant wage declines as a result of new immigration. ...
