Immigrant Employment Up - U.S. Citizen Employment Down

[Hyperelastic]

From here - registration required.

WASHINGTON (AP) – The number of adult immigrants holding a job has grown by more than 2 million since 2000, while the number of employed native-born Americans fell by nearly a half-million, according to a study released Wednesday by a group that favors stricter immigration controls.

The Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, in its analysis of Census Bureau data, also found that occupations with some of the highest unemployment rates among U.S.-born citizens tended to be in job sectors such as construction that had the largest influx of recent immigrants.

…

Some bosses also may prefer to hire illegal immigrants because they will accept cheaper wages and fewer benefits, Camarota said.

…

``We find little evidence for the argument that immigrants only take jobs that natives don’t want,’’ Camarota said.

The center’s analysis found 19.7 million immigrants working, according to March 2004 census data, an increase of 2.3 million from 2000. About half the growth over the four-year span was due to illegal immigrants, Camarota estimated.

During the same period, the number of native-born workers decreased by 482,000 to 115.3 million.

Camarota said the highest unemployment rate among natives was in the construction trade, at 12.7 percent. This is a field that also employed the largest number of immigrants who arrived since 2000. There were similar trends in the food preparation and building cleaning and maintenance.

A range of interpretations is possible. Would there be 2.3 million more employed U.S. citizens had there been no immigration since 2000? Or were all these jobs simply “tacked on” to the existing economy, i.e. would not have been created except for the availability of cheap labor? The answer is of course somewhere in between.

[hill_o_beans]

I have a question about this, hopefully it isn’t a “dumb” one.

The number of adult immigrants holding a job has grown by more than 2 million since 2000, while the number of employed native-born Americans fell by nearly a half-million, according to a study released Wednesday by a group that favors stricter immigration controls.

Couldn’t the reduction in employed native-born Americans be due to retirement? I have read that due to the aging of the work force, America needs immigrant labor or it will be in serious trouble in 25-50 years:

First-generation immigrants play a crucial role in the U.S. economy, comprising almost one in eight workers and one in four low-wage workers. They fill critical jobs, are the backbone of many industries, and are net contributors to the nation’s tax base. Without current and future immigrants in the workforce, our aging society will be dramatically short of workers to staff its offices, factories, and farms; short of savings and investment to support national economic growth, and short of tax revenues to finance government services and Social Security outlays. (From Newcomers in the American Workplace: Improving Employment OUtcomes for Low-Wage Immigrants and Refugees by the Rockerfeller Foundation, produced by Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees, 2003)

With the declining birthrate, there just won’t be enough people to fill all the jobs in the near future. I wonder if we need to be embracing this change and trying to train the immigrant workforce now so that we will be ahead of the curve.

(Disclosure: I teach English classes to adult immigrants and refugees, and I will soon start a new job teaching workforce training classes to adult ESL students.)

[Siege]

Hyperelastic, this thread makes me just a tiny bit nervous. You see, I am an adult immigrant holding a job. I’m also a U. S. citizen and have been one for nearly 20 years now. I’ve lived in this country since I was 2 1/2. Now, I’m not cheap labor. I’m a dead good computer programmer with a background in human languages as well as computer ones. I have a brother who’s another adult immigrant holding a job. He hasn’t been a citizen as long as I have, but he was even younger when we moved here. He, too, is by no means cheap labor and also very good at his job. Are the likes of the two of us being counted in that statistic? Should we feel guilty about stealing jobs from Americans when, for all intents and purposes, we are Americans? Among other things, my brother has a nice, middle class family of native-born American citizens to support.

Should I not have ambition because I wasn’t born in this country? I admit my father was hardly a poor immigrant willing to do any kind of work to get by; like my brother, he was an engineer. In Dad’s case, he came to this country because his boss asked him to. Why shouldn’t I go for my share of the American dream, or at least the Anglo-American dream? (It’s the same as the American one, but with custard on the apple pie.;)) If two people are equally qualified for the same job, should the native-born American citizen automatically be given it?

I’m afraid I don’t completely understand the point of the article cited. Yes, we immigrants are here in the United States, working hard and earning our living. If we were living off welfare, we’d be in trouble with some folks, too. Why shouldn’t we go for the best jobs we can get?

By the way, just to add a bit of irony to what I suspect is a rather incoherent post, I lost my last job because my boss wanted a cheaper, less qualified person for it. As far as I know, she and all the other applicants were native born American citizens. As for me, my new job pays more, and I’m back in my field. After all, why should I take less money to be an administrative assistant, when I can make more as an IT person?

CJ

[Kimstu]

Siege: You see, I am an adult immigrant holding a job. I’m also a U. S. citizen and have been one for nearly 20 years now. I’ve lived in this country since I was 2 1/2.

Then do you even count as an “immigrant” by the standards of that study? I read the article and could not see any way the data could distinguish between native-born citizens and citizens who had held US citizenship for their entire working careers, even if they were born in a foreign country.

Statistically, how is it possible to tell you apart from a native-born citizen just by your workplace data? You’ve had citizenship since you were a tiny child, you’ve had a Social Security number, a US education and work history, etc. IIRC, I have never had to provide any information to an employer about what my birth country was, although I’ve had to identify (and provide proof for) my country of citizenship.

[Siege]

Actually, I’ve had a Social Security number since I was 16 and have been a citizen since I was 21. As I understand it, if your parents are naturalized when you’re under 18, you automatically become a citizen along with them; otherwise, you can’t start the proceedings until you’re at least 18. I have, actually, also had to provide proof of my country of citizenship once when an employer was audited by the INS. Unfortunately, I had no idea where my naturalization certificate was at the time, so this proved problematic. I do still have a slight British accent which marks me as not being from around here, but if you heard my city’s accent, you’d understand why!

I’m not sure where the author of the article is getting his figures from or what he’s on about. If you take the title of the OP on its own, technically, when I took that admin assistant job after 7 months of being laid off, both the number of employed adult immigrants and the number of employed American citizens went up.

Some clarification, please?
CJ

[UDS]

@Hyperelastic

. . . A range of interpretations is possible. Would there be 2.3 million more employed U.S. citizens had there been no immigration since 2000? Or were all these jobs simply “tacked on” to the existing economy, i.e. would not have been created except for the availability of cheap labor? The answer is of course somewhere in between.

You’re forgetting a third possiblity - that these immigrants came to the US because they were needed to fill the jobs. And this one is probably also a part of the answer.

Even if the overall number of jobs available is stable, demographic changes - increased propensity to delay entry to the workforce, or to retire, declining fertility, that kind of thing - may mean that more jobs have to be filled by immigrants, because there are no US citizens to fill them, or US citizens don’t want to fill them.