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Study: Native workers lose jobs
By DANIEL GILBERT
dgilbert@potomacnews.com
Thursday, March 23, 2006


A new study on the entry of immigrant workers to the U.S. workforce suggests a direct, negative impact foreign workers have on American-born workers in Virginia and nationwide.

The report by the Center for Immigration Studies -- a research and policy organization that advocates stricter limits on immigration -- found that native workers are dropping out of the labor force while more immigrants are participating. Native workers without a high school diploma were the most harshly affected by the trend, according to the study.

The report shows that in 2000, "less-educated" native workers in Virginia accounted for 73.4 percent of the labor force. That number fell 7 percentage points to 66.4 percent in 2005, while the percent of immigrants in the labor force rose from 8.8 percent to 15.4 percent over the same period.

Steven Camarota, director of research for CIS and the study's author, said the decrease in the labor participation among natives was surprising.

"You might lose your job, but you don't leave the labor market when you lose your job," he said. "You leave the labor market when you give up trying to find a job."

While the numbers are new, Camarota has made the argument before, and wrote in December 2005 that "any effect immigration may have on the wages or job opportunities of natives will disproportionately affect less-educated workers."

Fewer natives participating in the labor force could mean a combination of several things, Camarota said: immigrants might be crowding out natives in the job market, employers may have a preference for immigrant workers and immigrants may have developed more effective mechanisms for finding work than natives.

Immigrant workers are not driving wages below what a native will work for, Camarota said. The proof, he argues, is that natives are still in jobs with heavy concentrations of immigrants.

For example, 49.8 percent of agricultural workers in 2003-04 were immigrants, according to the report. Native workers -- 28,000 above the age of 15 -- balanced out the rest of the labor in the industry.

Under the category of "maids and housekeeping cleaners" -- another occupation populated by foreign workers -- 43.7 percent of jobs were filled by adult immigrants, outnumbered by 1.2 million adult native workers in the industry.

"This is not supportive of the fact that America is desperately short of those workers," said Camarota, who interprets the data as challenging the notion that immigrants fill jobs Americans won't do.

Not everyone agrees.

Jean-Mari Peltier, president of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, advocated an increase of visas to foreign-born farm workers in a press release last week.

"Given the refusal of American citizens to fill needed jobs in agricultural activities, it is clear that foreign workers will harvest these crops," Peltier said in the release.

Kenneth Annis, chairman of Virginia's Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers Advisory Board, thought the numbers quoted to him from the CIS study were off.

"I'd say over half the agricultural workers are unauthorized to be here," he said. "In Virginia, foreign workers do about 70 percent of farm work," which Annis said included apple-picking in Northern Virginia, and everything from tomato farming to harvesting tobacco in the southern parts of the state. "The local workforce will not do agriculture anymore. Most people are from Mexico."

The CIS report also showed that men without a high school diploma experienced a 1 percent decline in wages from 1999 to 2004, while those with more than a high school education saw an increase of 10 percent.

Camarota dismissed the notion that more educated workers earn more money as a result of greater competition driving down wages for less educated workers.

Acknowledging that lost wages "don't disappear into thin air," Camarota said the economic output of unskilled workers is too small to translate into a significant economic boost for other workers, employers and consumers to share.

"Try driving down the wages of CEOs," he said. "Then you might get a nice little benefit."