South Carolinian wages depressed by immigration
09/05/2007
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF

In an unusually fine piece of incisive reporting, Noelle Phillips of South Carolina's The State newspaper got right to the point: Study links Hispanics, pay drop Posted on Fri, Aug. 31, 2007

As South Carolina's Hispanic population has grown, wages for all workers have dropped, a USC study released Thursday found.

While study authors were careful not to pin all the blame on immigrants, their findings were similar to other research done elsewhere, including Harvard University.

S.C. median annual wages, adjusted for inflation, dropped 3.1 percent to $28,039 between 2000 and 2005 when the state experienced rapid growth in its Hispanic population. Pay in construction, the dominant field for Hispanics, slipped 5 percent for all S.C. workers during what was a record housing boom. Hispanic construction wages fell by more than twice that.

"When an industry is booming like this, you expect to see wages increase, not decline like this" said Doug Woodward, a research economist at the USC Moore School of Business

One has to say the study's Doug Woodward gets the point too:

"What we're doing here in South Carolina is importing cheap labor to our economy" Woodward said.

The study in question has now appeared on the website of the University of South Carolina's Consortium for Latino Immigration Studies: The Economic and Social Implications of the Growing Latino Population in South Carolina (PDF file).

It is a devastating document which patriots could fruitfully study.

Of course the authors twist themselves in knots to avoid being politically incorrect. For instance, speaking of South Carolina's schools English reinforcement program on Page 5

English Language Learners (ELL) represent only 2 percent of the total public school population, and 62 percent of the total Latino student population, indicating that almost 40 percent of Latino students are fluent in English and fully integrated in "mainstream" classrooms

The fact that a Latino child is not in the English booster program does not prove he is "fully integrated" of course, but more importantly, the key fact is 60% of the children of this new population need expensive remediation courses. These inevitably take resources which could otherwise have helped American children.

 But the poor human capital constituted by the influx is lucidly documented:

Over half of the USC survey respondents (age 16 and over) reported that they spoke no English or only a few words of English, and another 25 percent described their English skills as poor. That means that over three-quarters of those surveyed (age 16 and over) do not speak English well

(P4)

according to the USC survey, only 16 percent of Latinos had completed high school, and a large part of the male working population has little formal education: 39 percent of Latino males age 25 and older had attended school less than nine years. Just 16 percent of Latino males had some college.

(P6) And their impact at ground zero of their economic effect—landscaping—vividly spelled out:

Many Hispanics found full-time jobs between 2000 and 2005 in Landscaping Services (with a 67 percent increase in the number working in that sector), although, again, real median earnings fell by 14 percent.

For Blacks, Landscaping Service employment grew over the period - but real earnings fell approximately 10 percent. For Whites working in landscaping, employment and earnings declined by 1.5 percent and 5.3 percent, respectively.

(P7) (Of course, this was wonderful for Senator Lindsey Graham's rich garden-maintaining friends.)

 The reward for doing this important study and for the excellent reporting of it has been—needless to say—to be ignored by the MSM. The State's story was run in an abridged form by the Charlotte Observer, but otherwise, silence. This is exactly what happened with a broader study on mass immigration's impact on Canadian and US wages last May.

 There was one exception, which I hereby nominate for Joe Guzzardi's Worst Immigration Reporting of the Year prize.

Study: Hispanics Not Taking Jobs Away By KATRINA A. GOGGINS Associated Press 08.30.07

 manages to completely omit the wage effect and confine itself to immigration-enthusiast misrepresentations:

"There's a myth that Hispanics drain our system," said Lee McElveen, Hispanic/Latino coordinator for the South Carolina Commission on Minority Affairs. "This report reveals something different."

Correct Lee McElveen. Complain to AP about Katrina Goggins. Applaud Noelle Phillips.

Print Friendly and PDF