Thread: Hispanic-white job divide grows

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Hispanic-white job divide grows
Latinos moving into high-paying fields at slower rate, study finds

08:51 PM CST on Wednesday, December 14, 2005
By DIANNE SOLÃ?S and ISABEL C. MORALES / The Dallas Morning News

Samuel Izaguirre, a cook in an elegant Dallas restaurant, is trying to support his growing family of five as best he can. But the 30-year-old knows his chances for upward mobility are limited – especially with an education that ended at fifth grade in Mexico.

In the go-go '90s, Latinos in the U.S. saw increases in homeownership, purchasing power and employment. But the boom masked a different trend – and one closer to Mr. Izaguirre's life.

As a whole, Latinos were not moving ahead into higher-paid professional occupations. They were rooting deeper into historically lower-wage jobs, according to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

The study shows a widening of the occupational divide between the two largest segments of the labor force – Latinos and whites. The findings are surprising in that many believed that the rising economic tide in last decade of the 20th century lifted all boats.

But from 1990 to 2000, the proportion of Hispanic males in professional jobs dropped while the proportion of white males in the class continued to grow. At the same time, the Hispanic share of construction jobs grew at more than four times the rate of whites.

Structural shifts in the U.S. economy – and not just immigration – are to blame, the study's authors said. Latinos remain clustered in nonprofessional construction and service occupations. Those jobs rank low in earnings and education requirements, the study said.

"Hispanics were essentially treading ground in the '90s and losing ground in the areas where the economy was educating more workers," said Rakesh Kochhar, associate director of research at the Pew center. The technology industry, in particular, was taking off during that period.

"You have, in essence, a division of labor," said Maude Toussaint-Comeau, one of the study's authors and an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

The focus on Hispanic labor has sharpened in recent years, and lawmakers are in the midst of heated debate over tougher immigration legislation.

From 2000 to 2004, Latinos were responsible for about half of U.S. labor force growth, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. They now make up 13 percent of the labor force – a bigger share than blacks.

Native-born, college-educated Latinos benefited from the boom in higher-paying jobs. But their numbers were exceeded by those who stayed stuck in low-wage jobs.

Policy initiatives of more education and job-matching programs for low-skilled workers would help bridge the gap, said Ms. Toussaint-Comeau, whose specialty is immigrant assimilation. Hispanic immigrants under the age of 20 have a particularly good chance of moving up, she said.

"This [study] speaks to the great ability of the second generation ... to share the fruits of economic prosperity in this country," Ms. Toussaint-Comeau said.

Mr. Izaguirre, the Dallas cook, is the first to acknowledge this.

"I want my children to study here and learn English because I haven't been able to," Mr. Izaguirre said of his three children. "Here you can choose to work or study, and I have to work to sustain my family."

Evidence of the skills and education chasm can be seen throughout the South, where Latino immigrant populations are growing.

In Louisiana and Mississippi, for example, immigrants from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Colombia have moved in by the thousands to take low-skilled jobs in the cleanup after Hurricane Katrina.

Many of them say they take jobs that native-born Americans don't want to do.

Among them is Salvador Calderón, a 42-year-old construction worker, who didn't attend high school in his hometown just south of Mexico City.

"If we leave, who will clean this place up?" Mr. Calderón asked. "They can't find people who will work for $10 an hour."

The burst in numerical celebrity for Latinos – who now number more than 40 million – hasn't been matched by growth in the traditional metrics of earnings and employment, the study said.

The report's authors measured this, in part, by developing a "dissimilarity index" to chart differences in occupational distributions across worker groups. They further created a statistical analysis that assigns a socioeconomic status score to occupations, weighting for jobs that may not be well-paid but place value on education and experience.

Overall, the occupational distribution of Latinos most closely resembles the profile of black workers, with similar proportions found in professional, service, sales and production jobs, the report found.

"There is a trend to increasing inequality, and those left behind are those with less education," Pew's Mr. Kochhar said. "And since Hispanics are less likely to have education and to be without a high school degree, they are at the lowest rung in terms of earnings."

Native-born Hispanics are making as much as blacks. But foreign-born Hispanics fare worse. "So there is that growing inequality within the Hispanic labor force," Mr. Kochhar said.

Mr. Izaguirre takes a more global view.

Compared with jobs in his home state of Guanajuato in central Mexico, "it is better here than over there," he reasoned. "Here, they pay you better. At the very least, you get enough to buy a truck and send money back home to your mother."

E-mail dsolis@dallasnews.com

Latinos are white so what is this study talking about?

Who is keeping records separately for Latinos and for what purpose?

THREE GUESSES! AND, the first TWO DON'T COUNT!!! Let's see--could it be La Raza? Or some of those other 501 C 3 CHARITIES???

All I know is that back in 1986, Hispanics were sent over to the company I was working at, in hordes. They literally replaced every customer service representative job, and the regular people who held these jobs for years, were laid off. They called it reconstructering and downsizing. Hahaha.

Restructuring = Stabbing American Employees in the Back and callin' it "bidness".



Throw these Bum Employers in Jail where they belong.

Think Orange....Orange Jumpsuits.....That Make Their Butts Look Big!

Big, BIG BIDNESS!! ORANGE JUMPSUITS!

Samuel Izaguirre, a cook in an elegant Dallas restaurant, is trying to support his growing family of five as best he can. But the 30-year-old knows his chances for upward mobility are limited – especially with an education that ended at fifth grade in Mexico.

Psst, Sam, here's some free advice for you.

1) Don't have children you can't afford to support.
2) Job prospects for elementary school dropouts aren't going to be real good, no matter what country you break into.

LOVE IT, Count!! Couldn't have thought of better advice myself!!! Talk about a BABY BOOM GENERATION. We ain't seen NOTHING YET!