The
“Hispanic” category includes
individuals of any race, so part of the job gains
for each race is also included in the Hispanic category.
This explains why
Hispanic employment growth exceeds the national
total at a time when all other races’ employment rose
too.
But
the bottom line remains the same: Hispanics are
displacing whites and blacks from the workplace.
Whites are doing worst, both proportionately and
absolutely—astounding, considering they still make up
the substantial majority of America’s population.
Unfortunately, monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics
figures do not break out immigrants separately. But in
fact the “Hispanic” and “Asian” categories
are good proxies for immigration. Unpublished BLS data
for 2002 show that immigrants account for 56% percent of
the Hispanic workforce and a whopping 81 percent of the
Asian workforce. For whites the foreign-born share is
only 4 percent; for blacks, only 11 percent. [See
table
2]
So,
while it’s certainly Hispanics and to a lesser extent
Asians who are getting the new jobs, it’s also very
probably immigrants.
Moreover, even native-born Hispanic and Asians are
overwhelmingly the descendants of post-1970 immigrants.
Prior to that, Hispanics and Asians were not a
statistically significant component of the U.S.
population. Essentially, these new ethnic groups are the
creation of recent
public policy: the
1965 Immigration Act, combined with the federal
government’s subsequent failure to
prevent illegal immigration. Now, these new groups
are displacing older-stock Americans in the work place.
The
obvious reason Hispanics crowd out the traditional
American racial groups: they work for less. Recent
research shows that occupations in which new Hispanic
immigrants account for a quarter of the workforce pay as
much as 11% less than those where there are no new
Latino men. [Source: Eduardo Porter, “Hispanic Newcomers
Damp Wages,”
Wall Street Journal,
August 19, 2003]
I’ve written
before about the mounting evidence that Hispanics
are displacing other workers. More recently, the Pew
Hispanic Center
confirmed my findings (although it is in favor of
this displacement, of course).
The Pew study also provides confirmation
that it’s immigrant Hispanics, rather than
native-born Hispanics, who are doing the displacing.
The study detailed the changing employment
status of Hispanic workers by generation. During the
course of 2003 first generation Hispanics—the foreign
born—did much better than any of the U.S.-born
generations. From the first to the fourth quarter of
that year:
