Foreign-born workers gain 656,000 jobs
Study: Foreign-born workers gain 656,000 jobs
By Morgan Lee
Friday, October 29, 2010 at 10:46 p.m.
Immigrants have gained more than 600,000 jobs since the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, according to a newly released study.
Native-born workers fared far worse, shedding 1.5 million jobs, according to an analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center of U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Labor data.
Foreign-born workers picked up 656,000 jobs over the 12-month period, driving down that population's unemployment rate half a point to 8.7 percent. Immigrant workers make up 15.7 percent of the labor force.
The gains, however, were not nearly enough to make up for 1.1 million jobs lost among immigrants from second-quarter 2008 through second-quarter 2009. And immigrants experienced a sharp decline in median weekly earnings -- down 4.5 percent., compared to a loss of less than 1 percent for the native born.
"The unemployment rate for immigrants is still more than double the rate prior to the recession when it stood at 4.0 percent in the second quarter of 2007," the study said.
Released on Friday, the report was not able to separately identify illegal immigrants because that status was not recorded in the source data. It found that Hispanic immigrants experienced the largest drop in earnings of all ethnic and racial groups.
The report focused on the period from the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009, when most of the job losses during the recession occurred, and the subsequent 12 months that marked the first year of recovery from the recession.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010 ... 6000-jobs/
