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With immigration reform an election-year hot-button issue and immigrant workers flexing their political muscles in mass demonstrations, 2006 is a heady time for people from all over the world who followed their dreams to the United States.
In 2005, more than 21 million US workers were born in other countries, accounting for some 15 percent of the American workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). About half of these workers are undocumented, a fact that has taken attention away from issues such as how many professionals should immigrate legally.
"The illegal immigration debate has kind of hijacked the legal immigration debate," says Mitchell Wexler, a partner with immigration law firm Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy LLP in Irvine, California.
So this is a good juncture for a thumbnail portrait of the entire foreign-born workforce in America, a diverse legion of workers with enormous effects on our labor market and the US economy as a whole.
Immigrants by the Millions Work in Numerous Industries
The racial demographics of foreign-born workers in the United States are complex, but these workers are dominated by two groups: Hispanics/Latinos, at 49 percent, and Asians, at 22 percent.
These groups and others work in the full spectrum of US industries. Millions of immigrant workers were employed in each of these sectors in 2005: construction, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail. More than 1.1 million foreign-born employees worked in finance, insurance and real estate.
More than 2 million immigrant workers labored in healthcare and social assistance, and another 2 million worked in leisure and hospitality. More than 1.5 million government workers in the United States -- federal, state and local -- were born in other countries.
It may surprise some that only 400,000 agriculture workers out of the nation's 2.2 million were foreign-born.
Many Foreign-Born Workers in Highly Skilled Occupations
Portrayals of the immigrant labor force tend to focus on low-skilled or unskilled laborers, like drywall hangers and landscape workers. But highly skilled workers are a key component of the foreign-born labor force, and not just on the margins. Like their native-born counterparts, the largest occupational group for immigrant workers is management and professional jobs, at 26 percent.
There's a varied distribution of immigrants across occupational domains. Immigrants are overrepresented in BLS categories such as service occupations (they comprise 22.8 percent of the foreign-born workforce versus 15.2 percent of native-born workers), natural resources, construction and maintenance (16 percent versus 9.9 percent), and production, transportation and material moving (17 percent versus 12 percent).
Foreign-born workers are underrepresented in other areas, mainly white-collar occupations in management, professional and related occupations (26.2 percent of immigrants versus 36.2 percent of native-born workers), and in sales and office occupations (18 percent versus 26.7 percent).
Why Are Immigrants Reemployed More Quickly?
Interestingly, during the current labor recovery, idled immigrant workers have been quicker to reenter the ranks of the employed than their native-born counterparts. For both groups, unemployment stood at 5.5 percent in 2004; in 2005, native-born workers saw unemployment decline slightly to 5.2 percent while the jobless rate for immigrants plummeted to 4.6 percent.
Why have immigrants reentered the workforce so much faster than native-born workers? Perhaps because they'll accept the hard bargains employers offer these days. "The wages that are asked by citizen workers are considerably lower than the wages demanded by other workers," says Anthony Chan, chief economist for JP Morgan Private Client Services in Columbus, Ohio. "The influx of immigrants tends to pull down the level of wage increases, just like any increase in supply."
But not everyone blames meager wage increases strictly on market forces. "I wouldn't attribute lagging wages to foreign immigration," says Bernard Baumohl, director of Economic Outlook Group in Princeton Junction, New Jersey. "I'd attribute it to companies not distributing profits to employees."