Thread: Unemployed Americans Competing with Immigrants for jobs

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Unemployed Americans Competing With Immigrant Labor for Unskilled Jobs

Saturday, December 20, 2008

LOS ANGELES — A year ago, a day-laborer center adjacent to a Home Depot here teemed with Latin American immigrants who showed up and found a sure day's work painting, gardening or hauling.

These days, more than immigrants are packing the Hollywood Community Job Center: Unemployed Americans are joining them. There's little work for anybody.

"Everybody is coming to look for work," Rene Jemio, outreach coordinator for the hiring hall, told the Wall Street Journal. "It's not just your average immigrant anymore; it's African-Americans and whites, too."

For the first time in a decade, unskilled immigrants are competing with Americans for work. And evidence is emerging that tens of thousands of Hispanic immigrants are withdrawing from the labor market as U.S. workers crowd them out of potential jobs. At least some of the foreigners are returning home.

"We see competition from more nonimmigrant workers," says Abel Valenzuela, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who studies day laborers. "Employers are also paying less than in previous years," he says.

In the third quarter of 2008, 71.3 percent of Latino immigrant workers were either employed or actively seeking work, compared with 72.4 percent in the same quarter a year earlier, according to a new study by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization. The 1.1-percentage-point drop "marks a substantial decrease in the labor-market participation of Latino immigrants," says Rakesh Kochhar, the Pew economist who prepared the report.

Since 2003, the labor force participation rate — the employed or job-seeking share of the population — among foreign-born Hispanics had been consistently on the rise. The decline in the third quarter of 2008 "is a testament to the character and depth of the current recession triggered by the housing slump," says the Pew report.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,470656,00.html

Are these the jobs that they always claim Americans won't do ?

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Are these the jobs that they always claim Americans won't do ?

Yep, looks like it. Oh, and let's not forget Bush letting in guest workers too.

Unemployed Americans Competing With Immigrant Labor for Unskilled Jobs

No big surprise. We all saw it coming.

Wake up, Sheeple! When will you learn you are just a pawn in Somebody Else's game?

Ha, just wait till the 1 trillion $$$$ stimulus package puts illegals back to work, going to be interesting to see if Americans will fight for these jobs....

unless this traitorous governemt makes them legal FIRST ( you know the pathway that is not amnesty) then they will legally get those construction jobs!