The Republican leadership in the Senate is pushing for action on an immigration bill by the end of March. Hearings are underway in the Senate Judiciary Committee, but the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee says he needs more time if the committee is to report out a bill. If things go the way they are headed nothing will get done before this session ends. And that’s probably the point. The Republicans want to capitalize on voter unease about immigration in some parts of the country in the coming Congressional elections. And yet the Republican Party itself is split on the issue. The business wing of the Party that wants access to immigrant workers through a guest worker program and the hard right and nativist elements wants a wall along the border and draconian repression. .
The best that can be hoped for in this session is a deadlock—since it is almost unimaginable that anything friendly to workers—immigrant or native born can come out of this Congress.
Now, a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center provides facts that can help pierce the fog of misinformation and anxiety the clouds this issue. By providing an accurate snapshot of the migrant workforce and the jobs and industries in which they are employed, the report,
Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population, can help labor develop a nuanced worker-friendly approach to immigration reform that can allow migrants to find appropriate work; ensure that there are legal protections in place to protect them, including an amnesty for those currently employed in the US; and protect the jobs, wages, and working conditions of US workers.
Latino immigrants continue to come to the United States in increasing numbers. According the Pew report, between 2000 and 2005, 850,000 undocumented immigrants arrived in the US each year but about 350,000 also left each year, so the net average yearly gain was 500,000 people. Today the total number of undocumented workers in the US is between 11.5 and 12 million people which is about 30% of the 37 million foreign-born population of the US. And undocumented workers represent nearly 5% of the total US workforce of 148 million.
Most undocumented workers are from Mexico and Central America. This includes 6.2 million people, or 56% of the total undocumented population, from Mexico and 2.5 million, or 22% of the total, from Central America.
What stands out in the report is that despite the growing militarization of the border, especially since 9/11, the biggest growth spurt in the number of undocumented people has occurred since 2000. Today 66% of undocumented immigrants have been in the country less than 10 years. But most striking is the fact that 40%, or 4.4 million people, have been in the country 5 years or less.
Men make up only 49% of the total undocumented population. Women make up 35% and children about 16%. There are about 6.6 million “undocumented families” containing 14.6 million people in which either the head of the family or a spouse is undocumented. Fully 66% of all children in these families are US citizens by birth—about 3.1 million in 2005.
Undocumented immigrants are part of a classic push-pull pattern. Poverty, unemployment and underemployment push Latin American immigrants north. Many are drawn from the Mexican country-side where NAFTA based policies forced two million farmers off the land in the decade ending in 2003. Other workers lost jobs when cheaper foreign goods forced Mexico’s domestic manufacturing industries to close. And in the last few years, Mexico has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs to China displacing even more workers.
The migrants are pulled north toward a US economy that produces large numbers of lower wage, highly precarious, contingent and near contingent jobs. Today, close to 30% of all jobs in the US are contingent—either temporary, part-time, on-call, or independent contracting jobs. Many more jobs are near contingent—jobs with high turnover built into the job structure in industries like retail or fast food restaurants. It is an economy with a low-wage and contingent sector that can absorb many migrant workers.
Undocumented male migrants work at a greater rate than either legal immigrants or native born people: about 94% of undocumented males work compared to 85% of legal immigrants and 83% of native born workers. The reasons are fairly obvious: migrants made the arduous trip North to find work, and they are almost all are in the working age population.
By occupation about 19% undocumented workers are employed in construction; 31% work in service jobs of one sort or another; 15% work in production jobs; 12% in sales jobs; 10% in business professional jobs; 8% in transportation; and 4% in agriculture.
In some occupations undocumented immigrants make up a substantial percentage of the workforce. About 24% of all farm workers are undocumented immigrants; 17% of all cleaners; 14% of all construction workers; and 12% of all food preparation workers. Taking a closer look at jobs within these categories 36% of all insulation workers; 29% of all roofers and drywall workers; and 27% of all butchers and food processors are undocumented. It is interesting to note that many of these occupations have had a large immigrant component throughout the 20th century. What’s changed is the legal status of the workers and their countries of origin.
While immigrants continue to come to the US in large, even increasing numbers, there are some real trouble spots a head for the migrant workforce.
First, a report issued in 2005 by the Pew Hispanic Center indicates that as the economy picked up in 2004, new immigrants were finding jobs—in fact, one-third of all new jobs in the economy were filled by undocumented Latino immigrants who arrived after 2000. But like the wages of virtually all workers, the wages of the undocumented are falling, indeed for Latino immigrants wages are falling faster than those of non-immigrant workers. The report suggests that the large in-flux of migrants into the limited sectors of the labor market where they are employed may be increasing competition and driving down wages in these sectors.
Second, the occupational clusters that immigrants work in—construction and certain services—may be headed for a downturn. That’s because a lot of these jobs are dependent on the housing boom—both new construction and rehab work. If the housing boom slows or crashes—and the recent interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve Board make one of those scenarios a distinct possibility—residential housing construction jobs will likely be hard hit, putting many immigrants out of work and depressing wages for the those that do find work. The end of the housing boom may also affect employment in services such as landscaping and house cleaning—both major employers of undocumented workers—as middle class homeowners dependent on the “wealth effect” of their homes cut back on the services they purchase.
Third, the hardship generated by a shrinking number of jobs on offer will ripple through the entire hemisphere. Around $30 billion gets pumped into the economy of Latin America and the Caribbean each year from remittances sent by workers in the US. In Mexico 18% of all adults receive remittances, in El Salvador 28% do. This flow of money is growing—in all countries except El Salvador more than half of those receiving remittances from relatives have been receiving them for less than 3 years. The effect of a major slowdown in remittances will have a major impact on the region.
The time bought by the deadlock in Congress could give labor time to re-frame the debate and come up with a worker friendly immigration reform bill. To do that it would have to put the issue in the context of globalization and work with unions and social movements in the rest of the hemisphere to draft a comprehensive approach that would protect the rights of all migrant and non-migrant workers and contain development policies that would allow workers to remain in their home countries.
A step in the direction of recognizing the hemispheric and global nature of the issue has already been taken. As we reported in a previous blog, the governments of the nations of Latin America that send migrants to the US have banded together to lobby against the most draconian immigration reform bills currently before Congress. This recognition that immigration is no longer a strictly national issue should prompt the US labor movement to convene a hemispheric meeting of unions and social movements to help draft a worker-friendly immigration bill. Labor should not leave immigration reform to elite decision makers whether in the US or in the hemisphere.
M.O.
There were big immigrant demonstrations in Milwaukee today:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/23/latino.march/
Also ongoing protests of "reforms" in San Francisco:
http://snipurl.com/o48d
Posted by: janinsanfran | March 24, 2006 at 09:40 PM