Re: Illegal Workers Supplant U.S. Ones, Report Says
fred
punishments. Jail, seizure of all assets, etc.
Fred
"T Jr Hardman" <blockspam...@earthops.org> wrote in message
news:4519...@news101.his.com...
> johnny@. wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Subject:
>> Illegal Workers Supplant U.S. Ones, Report Says
>> From:
>> "Jim Higgins" <gordi...@hotmail.com>
>> Date:
>> Fri, 22 Sep 2006 08:18:32 -0400
>>
>>
>> Illegal Workers Supplant U.S. Ones, Report Says
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/us/22employ.html
>>
>> New illegal immigrants accounted for 56 percent of the increase in
>> employed workers in the United States in the five years after 2000, and
>> competition from these immigrants contributed to a sharp decline in
>> employment of teenage and young adult Americans, according to a labor
>> market study released yesterday.
>>
>> The survey found that in the five-year period, foreign-born workers,
>> including both legal and illegal immigrants, made up 86 percent of the
>> net increase in the total number of employed workers, the highest share
>> for immigrants ever recorded in this country.
>>
>> At the same time, the number of employed native workers ages 16 to 34
>> fell by more than 1.5 million. The study contends that 90 percent of the
>> job deficit for young Americans would be erased if American teenagers and
>> young adults held the jobs that immigrants now hold.
>>
>> The study was carried out by Andrew Sum, Paul Harrington and Ishwar
>> Khatiwada from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern
>> University in Boston and was published by the Center for Immigration
>> Studies, a group in Washington that advocates reducing immigration.
>>
>> Last month a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, another Washington
>> research organization, concluded that there was no nationwide pattern of
>> displacement of American workers by immigrants.
>>
>> Several economists noted that the past five years had been marked by a
>> slow economic recovery that created unusually few jobs for all workers in
>> the United States. They said that several factors contributed to
>> declining employment among young people and that an increase in the
>> number of youths going to college was one.
>>
>> Employment rates have plummeted for young black men without high school
>> diplomas.
>>
>> "They face tremendous barriers, but immigrant competition is not the
>> biggest one," said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy
>> Institute, a Washington group that focuses on labor issues. "If immigrant
>> competition were to drop significantly, they would still have big
>> problems."
>
> As I recall, for young black men between the ages of 18 and 30 who do
> not have college degrees, unemployment hovers around fifty percent.
>
> From the Center for Immigration Studies, a "think tank" in Washington DC:
>
> http://www.cis.org/articles/2006/back806release.html
>
> <quote>
>
> Immigrant Influx Harms Young Workers
> Employment Declines as Immigrants Arrive
>
> WASHINGTON (September 2006) — A new study authored by economists at
> Northeastern University and published by the Center for Immigration
> Studies finds that the arrival of new immigrants (legal and illegal) in
> a state is accompanied by a decline in employment among young
> native-born workers in that state. This indicates that immigration is
> displacing young native-born workers in the labor market. Although one
> recent report by another Washington think tank found no relationship
> between immigration and the troubling recent decline in the employment
> of the native-born, that study did not focus on young workers, who are
> often in direct competition with immigrants and are the ones most
> adversely affected.
>
> These findings are particularly troubling because a person’s early work
> experience – or lack thereof – has a significant impact on their
> performance in the labor market later in life. It is when young that
> people learn the skills necessary to successful employment, such as
> punctuality and taking direction from supervisors.
>
> The report, entitled, The Impact of New Immigrants on Young Native-Born
> Workers, 2000-2005, is embargoed until Thursday, September 21, 2006 at
> 9:30 am. Advance copies are available to the media. The study will be
> available online at www.cis.org .
>
> For more information, contact Andrew Sum at (617) 373-2242, Paul
> Harrington at (617) 373-2243, or Steven Camarota at (202) 466-8185 or
> s...@cis.org
>
> </quote>
>
> Here is the report itself:
>
> http://www.cis.org/articles/2006/back806.html
>
> <quote in-part no-graphics>
>
> The Impact of New Immigrants on
> Young Native-Born Workers, 2000-2005
>
> September 2006
>
> By Andrew Sum, Paul Harrington, and Ishwar Khatiwada
>
> Over the 2000-2005 period, immigration levels remained very high and
> roughly half of new immigrant workers were illegal. This report finds
> that the arrival of new immigrants (legal and illegal) in a state
> results in a decline in employment among young native-born workers in
> that state. Our findings indicate that young native-born workers are
> being displaced in the labor market by the arrival of new immigrants.
>
> * Between 2000 and 2005, 4.1 million immigrant workers arrived from
> abroad, accounting for 86 percent of the net increase in the total
> number of employed persons (16 and older), the highest share ever
> recorded in the United States.
>
> * Of the 4.1 million new immigrant workers, between 1.4 and 2.7
> million are estimated to be illegal immigrants. This means that illegal
> immigrants accounted for up to 56 percent of the net increase in
> civilian employment in the United States over the past five years.
>
> * Between 2000 and 2005, the number of young (16 to 34) native-born
> men who were employed declined by 1.7 million; at the same time, the
> number of new male immigrant workers increased by 1.9 million.
>
> * Multivariate statistical analyses show that the probability of
> teens and young adults (20-24) being employed was negatively affected by
> the number of new immigrant workers (legal and illegal) in their state.
>
> * The negative impacts tended to be larger for younger workers, for
> in-school youth compared to out-of-school youth, and for native-born
> black and Hispanic males compared to their white counterparts.
>
> * It appears that employers are substituting new immigrant workers
> for young native-born workers. The estimated sizes of these displacement
> effects were frequently quite large.
>
> * The increased hiring of new immigrant workers also has been
> accompanied by important changes in the structure of labor markets and
> employer-employee relationships. Fewer new workers, especially
> private-sector wage and salary workers, are ending up on the formal
> payrolls of employers, where they would be covered by unemployment
> insurance, health insurance, and worker protections.
>
> Introduction
>
> During the last five years, new immigrants have accounted for an
> overwhelming share of the growth in the number of employed persons in
> the United States. Native-born adults and established immigrants have
> been unable to capture much of the new employment opportunities that
> have been created in the nation since 2000. The number of employed
> persons in the civilian working-age (16 and over) population rose by
> 4.835 million between 2000 and 2005. During 2005, a total of 4.134
> million new immigrants were working in the United States. New immigrants
> who entered the United States since 2000 and were still residing here
> during 2005 accounted for 86 percent of the total increase in employment
> in the nation over the 2000 to 2005 period. Native-born and established
> immigrants accounted for less than one-sixth of the total rise in
> civilian employment that occurred in the nation over the past five
> years. These findings differ by gender. Among men, new immigrants
> accounted for all of the rise in employment, as the total number of
> employed men in the nation increased by only 2.665 million while the
> number of employed new immigrant males was 2.767 million during 2005.
> For the first time since the end of World War II, there has been no gain
> in employment among native-born men over a five-year period.
>
> [ TABLE 1 ]
>
> A substantial share of employed new immigrants appear to be illegal
> workers, often employed in off-payroll jobs that are increasingly
> concentrated in a newly emerging informal sector of the American labor
> market. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that there were 4.4 million
> illegal immigrants residing in the United States in 2005 who had entered
> the country since 2000[1]. We estimate that 2.857 million of these new
> illegal immigrants were actively participating in the labor force during
> 2005 and that about 5.5 percent of the immigrant labor force was
> unemployed[2]. With a labor force of 2.857 million and an estimated
> unemployment rate of 5.5 percent, we conclude that the number of new
> illegal immigrants who were working in the United States during 2005 was
> 2.7 million. This means that about two-thirds of all employed recent
> immigrants in the United States were working illegally during 2005 and
> that more than one-half (56 percent) of the total rise in employment
> that occurred in the nation between 2000 and 2005 was attributable to
> the growth in employment among illegal immigrant workers.
>
> The extraordinarily high share of new employment captured by new
> immigrants was accompanied by a powerful shift in the organization of
> the nation’s labor markets. In a subsequent section of this report we
> will provide evidence that some employers have begun to re-organize work
> in ways that systematically exclude certain native-born workers,
> especially those under the age of 35, from employment and that create
> work that does not meet the basic labor standards that have been
> developed over the years by federal and state legislation, custom and
> tradition, and through labor-management/collective bargaining agreements.
>
> The ability of the nation’s teen and young adult (20-24) population to
> become employed has deteriorated badly over the past five years.
> Employment levels for all those aged 16 to 34 have fallen by more than
> 1.5 million between 2000 and 2005, even as the total number of employed
> persons increased by more than 4.8 million over the same period of time.
> Several alternate explanations might help explain this employment
> decline among young people in the nation. Part of the explanation could
> simply be associated with demographic change. Reductions in the size of
> the teen and young adult age cohorts can result in employment declines
> even though the likelihood of a member of that cohort finding work
> doesn’t change. Alternately, changes in the likelihood of becoming
> employed can reduce the number of young people working. The first
> explanation has no validity since the number of native-born people aged
> 16 to 34 rose as the echo generation (baby boomers’ children born
> between 1978 and 1996) moved into this age group in large numbers.
>
> [ TABLE 2 ]
>
> The number of native-born males aged 16 to 34 in the population
> increased by nearly 1.1 million between 2000 and 2005[3]. Rather than
> reducing employment levels, these demographic forces would have been
> expected to increase overall employment levels of native-born males aged
> 16 to 34. Indeed, we estimate that if the proportion of native-born
> young males working during 2005 were the same as the share of
> native-born workers employed during the full employment year of 2000,
> 1.721 million more young native-born men would have been at work during
> that year. Employment among native-born young men declined not because
> there were fewer young men, but because their employment rates declined
> precipitously. The employment to population (E/P) ratio of young males
> has fallen sharply over the last five years. Some of these declines are
> quite extraordinary and, in the case of male teens, the 2005 E/P ratio
> was the lowest in the nation over the entire 58-year period covered by
> the Current Population Survey (CPS) teen employment series.
>
> [ TABLE 3 ]
>
> Among females, the trends in employment have been similar. While the
> size of the young native-born and established-immigrant female
> population has increased at about the same rate as males, the number who
> are employed has declined sharply. Similar to findings for their male
> counterparts, the E/P ratio of native-born female teens and young adults
> fell considerably over the last five years, accounting for all of the
> decline in employment among young native-born females. If native-born
> teen and young-adult females had been able to maintain their employment
> rate at the same level as the full employment year of 2000, then the
> number who were employed in 2005 would have increased by 1.382 million.
>
> The decline in employment levels among native-born teens and young
> adults implies that employers have turned to alternative sources of
> labor supply to meet their labor requirements. One alternative source of
> substitute labor is, of course, the surging older worker population
> fueled by the baby boom age cohort entering their pre-retirement years
> in the past five years. These individuals represent a ready potential
> source of substitute workers for teens and young adults. The other
> potential alternative source of labor supply is the flow of new
> immigrants to the United States since 2000. Large numbers of new foreign
> workers, the majority of whom entered the United States and work here
> illegally, also represent a ready source of labor supply to take the
> place of native-born and established-immigrant teens and young adults in
> the nation’s labor markets.
>
> As noted below, the job deficit for native-born male teens and young
> adults in the nation was 1.721 million, while the number of new
> immigrant male workers in the same age group in 2005 was 1.859 million
> (Table 4). If the jobs held by new immigrant males aged 16 to 34 were
> made available to jobless native-born males, then the job deficit among
> the native-born would be completely eliminated. Among women, the
> substitution of jobless native-born young women for recent young female
> immigrants would result in the native-born female job deficit declining
> by more than 60 percent. Overall, nearly 90 percent of the native-born
> teen and young adult job deficit that has emerged over the last five
> years would be eliminated if native-born teens and young adults worked
> in jobs now held by recent immigrants of the same age. While some
> mismatches in the occupational composition of employment might occur
> between native-born and foreign-born workers, the jobs held by these
> groups are quite similar to jobs in all occupations simultaneously held
> in large numbers by both foreign-born and native-born workers[4]. These
> findings strongly suggest that a major proportion of the native-born job
> deficit of teens and young adults that has developed in the United
> States over the past five years is the result of newly arrived, young
> female, and especially male immigrants displacing these potential
> workers from employment. Native-born older workers are a much
> less-likely substitute for employers who hire many fewer native-born
> teens and young adults. Native-born older workers have differing levels
> of work experience, expectations of hours and weeks of work, and are
> paid at considerably higher wage rates than are teen and young adult
> workers. Recent young immigrant workers are much closer substitutes for
> young native-born workers compared to the aging members of the baby boom
> generation.
>
> [ TABLE 4 ]
>
> Impacts of New Immigrants on Young Adult Employment
> Most studies of the economic impacts of immigration on native-born
> workers have focused on wage and annual earnings impacts rather than
> employment impacts. There is a general tendency among labor market
> analysts to assume that, as a result of labor market and wage
> flexibility, there are few job displacement effects of immigration on
> native-born workers, citing older studies to back up these opinions.
> Several more recent statistical studies, however, indicate that
> less-educated native-born workers, teenagers, and black males do suffer
> employment declines as a result of immigrant labor inflows[5].
> Ethnographic research work in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York
> City, and other large central cities across the nation has revealed that
> young immigrant workers are often preferred by employers over poorly
> educated native-born workers, especially those from inner city
> neighborhoods characterized by high poverty rate[6].
>
> One might well expect the labor displacement effects of immigration to
> be low in periods of full employment, when job opportunities are
> abundant and vacancy rates are high, such as the late 1990s in the
> United States when employment rose across the board among both most
> native-born workers and new immigrant workers. However, in more slack
> labor market environments, such as the 2003-2004 period, one might well
> expect that a rise in the supply of immigrant labor could generate
> displacement impacts on native-born workers, especially among those in
> most direct competition for available jobs with newly arrived immigrant
> workers, such as young, native-born adults with limited formal
> schooling, especially those in central cities.
>
> To test whether the influx of new immigrant workers over the 2000-2003
> period had an adverse effect on the employment prospects of the nation’s
> young adults (16-24 years old), we estimated a series of multivariate
> statistical employment models for young adults, including a variable
> representing the relative size of new immigrant inflows into the labor
> force of the state in which the young adult resided at the time of the
> 2003 American Community Survey (ACS)[7]. The relative sizes of these new
> immigrant labor force inflows varied quite considerably across states
> between 2000 and 2003. The size of these immigrant inflows ranged across
> the 50 states and the District of Columbia from a low of .2 percent to a
> high of 3.9 percent, with a mean of 1.63 percent.
>
> The dependent variable in this multivariate statistical model was the
> employment status of a 16-24 year-old respondent at the time of the 2003
> ACS. The variable was a dichotomous variable that took on the value of
> one if the respondent was employed (either part-time or full-time) and
> the value of zero if he/she was not employed at the time of the ACS. The
> right-hand-side predictor variables included the gender, age,
> race-ethnic group, and educational attainment of the respondent, the
> unemployment rate of the state in which he/she resided at the time of
> the survey in 2003, and the relative size of new immigrant labor inflows
> into the state since 2000. We estimated these employment probability
> models for all 16-24 year olds and for a variety of gender, nativity,
> gender and schooling, and school enrollment subgroups[8]. The findings
> in Table 5 display the estimates of a one percentage-point increase in
> the state labor force due to new immigration on the probability of
> employment among young adults.
>
> [ TABLE 5 ]
>
> For the entire sample of 16-24 year olds[9], a one percentage-point
> increase in the state labor force due to new immigration would have
> lowered the predicted employment rate of such youth by 1.2 percentage
> points. The estimated impact was highly statistically significant
> (.001). For a state with a recent large influx of new immigrants (a
> three percentage-point rise in the civilian labor force of the state),
> the probability of employment among 16-24 year olds in that state would
> have declined by a substantial 3.6 percentage points.
>
> The estimated impacts of new immigrant workers on the employment rates
> of 16-24 year olds were approximately the same for the native-born as
> they were for all 16-24 year olds, but as expected were considerably
> larger for men than for women (-1.6 percentage points for men versus -.9
> percentage points for women)[10], and were larger for less-educated
> women than for women with some post-secondary schooling[11], The finding
> of larger adverse employment impacts for men than for women is not
> surprising given the relatively high share of new immigrant workers that
> were men (66 percent). Larger adverse impacts for less-educated workers
> were also expected given the above-average share of new immigrant
> workers who lacked a high school diploma and the weaker national labor
> market for less-educated native-born workers during this time period.
> The results in Table 6, thus, provide substantive empirical evidence
> that the recent influx of new immigrant workers has resulted in job
> losses for many subgroups of young adults in the nation, especially in
> those states that were more heavily impacted by new immigrant labor.
> Males, in-school youth, less-educated workers, and black males appear to
> have been more adversely affected than other demographic subgroups of
> young adults.
>
> [ TABLE 6 ]
>
> The availability of the public use micro data from the 2004 ACS allowed
> us to update our findings on the impacts of new immigrant worker inflows
> in states on the employment probabilities of very young adults. Given
> the continuing severe labor market problems of teens and youth in their
> early 20s throughout 2004, we selected 16-20 year olds for our analysis.
> There were observations for approximately 74,000 youth in this age group
> on the ACS public use files, of whom 58,600, or nearly 80 percent, were
> enrolled in school at the time of the ACS survey’s completion[12].
>
> The dependent variable in these models is the employment status of the
> respondent at the time of the survey. Those employed respondents,
> including persons with a job but temporarily absent due to vacation,
> weather-related factors, etc., were coded as a "1" and all others as
> "0." In these models, we control for a wide array of demographic and
> family income background variables, the school enrollment status and
> educational attainment of the respondents, the unemployment rate of the
> state in which they lived, and the relative size of new immigrant worker
> inflows since 2000[13].
>
> These regression models of young adult employment rates were estimated
> for all 16-20 year olds and for a variety of gender, race, and school
> enrollment subgroups. Estimates of the impact of new immigrant inflows
> on the probability of employment of young adults are displayed in Table 6.
>
> For the entire group of 16-20 year olds, the presence of new immigrants
> in their state’s workforce had a strong, statistically significant,
> negative impact on the likelihood that they will be employed. A one
> percentage-point increase in the share of new immigrants in the state’s
> workforce will reduce the probability of employment of young adults by
> 2.1 percentage points. The effects of new immigrant workers are negative
> and statistically significant for each subgroup of young adults in Table
> 6, and are equally large for both men and women[14], but they are much
> larger for in-school youth than for out-of-school youth (2.4 percent vs.
> 0.6 percent). The size of the coefficient was highest for black men,
> implying that they are the most adversely affected by new immigrant
> inflows.
>
> New Immigrant Workers’ Impact on the Job Market
>
> The rise in immigrant employment, especially among illegal workers, over
> the past decade has been accompanied by a number of important changes in
> the structure of employment relationships in U.S. labor markets. Recent
> years have seen the growth in contractor employment relationships and
> the use of independent consultants and off-the-books workers[15]. These
> newly hired workers do not go on the formal payrolls of the firms that
> hire them, and they typically are not paid employee benefits such as
> health insurance and pension benefits or covered by the Unemployment
> Insurance, workers compensation, or Social Security systems.
>
> These changing employment relationships are not simply revealed in
> growing media coverage of labor market developments at the local level,
> but also show up in the large differences between employment changes
> registered by the two national surveys used by the U.S. Bureau of Labor
> Statistics to estimate monthly employment, the Current Employment
> Statistics Survey (CES) payroll survey and the Current Population Survey
> (CPS) household survey[16]. The CES generates a monthly count of wage
> and salary payroll jobs from a monthly sample of about 160,000
> businesses and federal, state, and local government organizations
> covering 400,000 individual establishments that participate in the
> unemployment insurance system. The CES is considered by many economic
> and financial analysts to be the primary source of data on wage and
> salary job growth and decline in the nation and among states and is a
> primary topic of discussion and analysis in BLS’ monthly Employment
> Situation news release, which is widely covered by the national media.
> One of the most important uses of the CES data at the national level is
> to measure the job-generating performance of the economy over the course
> of the business cycle.
>
> A second source of information on monthly employment trends at the
> national and state levels is the findings of the CPS. The CPS is a
> survey of approximately 60,000 households conducted each month by the
> Census Bureau for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unlike the CES,
> which measures only the number of private and public formal payroll
> jobs, the CPS provides a more comprehensive count of the number of
> employed persons ages 16 and older each month. The CPS employment count
> includes not only workers in traditional wage and salary jobs, but also
> workers outside the scope of the payroll employment survey, including
> agricultural workers, the self-employed, independent contractors, unpaid
> family workers, and some "under the table" or "off-the-books"
> workers[17]. The CPS survey counts each employed person only once,
> regardless of the number of jobs he/she holds at the time of the survey,
> while persons holding multiple wage and salary jobs will be counted
> twice in the CES. Historically, the CPS and CES employment measures have
> tracked one another fairly well. However, during the past five years
> considerable differences have emerged between the two surveys’ estimates
> of the overall increase in the nation’s employment levels, with the CPS
> showing much greater growth in private sector wage and salary
> employment. These findings stand in sharp contrast to that observed for
> earlier time periods.
>
> During both the 1980s and 1990s economic expansions, the growth in
> payroll employment levels in the nation was greater than that measured
> by the household survey. Typically, payroll employment levels in the
> nation grow rapidly during the early stages of recovery from an economic
> recession. Rising Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increases the demand for
> labor by employers who then add more workers to their payrolls. Over the
> period from the early 1960s though 2000, the nation experienced five
> recoveries from economic recessions. On average, the nation’s wage and
> salary employment levels increased by 11.7 percent during the first four
> years of recovery for these five post-recession periods. The rates of
> new job creation varied from a low of 7.3 percent during the early
> stages of recovery from the 1990-1991 recession to a 16 percent rise in
> the nation’s wage and salary employment levels during the recovery from
> the recession of 1974-75.
>
> However, the rate of job growth during the first four years
> of recovery from the recession of 2001 has been much
> slower than the historic pace of national payroll
> employment growth in recovery periods. Despite robust
> rates of growth in real GDP, strong growth in corporate profits,
> and a stock market boom, the nation’s rate of
> new payroll employment growth was just 2.5 percent
> between 2001 Q4 and 2005 Q4. This rate of new job creation
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> was equal to only one-fifth of the historical average rate
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> of new job creation over the previous five recoveries (Table 7).
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Why has the rate of payroll employment growth been
> so slow over the past four years, given the
> strong overall performance of the nation’s economy
> by most key economic indicators? Increased labor
> productivity growth appears to be an important explanation,
> but part of the answer is associated with
> strong growth in off-payroll employment,
> especially among the recent-immigrant population.
> Since the end of the 2001 recession in the
> fourth quarter of 2001, payroll employment in the nation
> increased by just 3.23 million jobs while
> the number of working-age persons who were employed,
> according to the CPS, rose at twice that pace,
> increasing by 6.446 million (Table 8).
> Unlike the employment expansions of the 1980s and 1990s,
> when payroll employment growth substantially
> outpaced that of household employment,
> the current recovery is characterized by
> a new pattern of job growth.
>
> [ TABLE 7 ]
>
> [ TABLE 8 ]
>
> Over the entire 2000 to 2005 period, the nature of the relationship
> between the employment growth estimates of the two surveys has changed
> radically. Between 2000 and 2005, wage and salary employment levels, as
> measured by the CES, rose by only 1.678 million or 1.3 percent while the
> CPS found that the number of employed workers increased by 4.672 million
> over the same period of time (Table 9). On an annual average basis, we
> find that employment as measured by the CES business establishment
> survey increased from 131.785 million during 2000 to 133.463 million by
> 2005, an increase in non-agricultural payroll jobs of only 1.678
> million. In contrast, the household survey found that the number of
> working-age persons employed in the nation increased from 136.934
> million to 141.606 million, a rise of 4.672 million over the 2000 to
> 2005 period, a difference of nearly three million.
>
> [ TABLE 9 ]
>
> The CPS household survey measured a rise in employment
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> that was nearly three times greater than that measured
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> by the CES over the 2000-2005 period. As we noted earlier,
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> the CPS and the CES use somewhat different employment concepts.
> The CPS includes agricultural workers, the self-employed,
> independent contractors, unpaid family workers, and some
> off-the-books workers while the CES does not.
>
> We have adjusted the CPS employment data to more closely fit the CES
> employment concepts in order to obtain a more direct comparison between
> the CPS and CES measures of employment change over the 2000 to 2005
> period[18]. Our first adjustment was to exclude agricultural workers
> from the CPS household survey employment count since the CES measures
> only employment in the non-agricultural sector of the nation’s economy
> (Table 10). After excluding agricultural workers, non-farm employment as
> measured by the CPS survey increased more considerably — by 4.976
> million between 2000 and 2005 — indicating that employment among
> agricultural workers declined over this five-year period. It is
> important to note that recent immigrants are about 1.8 times more likely
> to work in the nation’s agricultural industries than are the native-born.
>
> [ TABLE 10 ]
>
> The estimated decline in agricultural employment over the last five
> years suggests that this sector was not a major source of new employment
> opportunities for new immigrants[19]. Excluding agricultural sector
> employment from the CPS totals further widens the difference between the
> CPS employment growth estimate and the CES job growth estimate over this
> period, raising the size of the gap in employment growth from 2.994
> million to 3.268 million. The CPS estimate of new employment growth
> rises to 2.95 times that estimated from the CES payroll survey versus
> only 2.78 times when agricultural employment is included in the CPS
> totals.
>
> Much of the new payroll job creation that occurred in the nation over
> the 2000 to 2005 period was concentrated in the government sector. About
> 60 percent of the total rise in payroll employment that was generated
> nationally over the last five years has been on government payrolls.
> Native-born workers are much more likely than immigrants, especially
> recent immigrants, to work in federal, state, and local government
> agencies. During 2005, native-born workers were three times more likely
> to be employed in a government job compared to employed recent
> immigrants (Table 11). The CES estimated that between 2000 and 2005,
> federal, state, and local government payroll employment increased by
> 1.023 million jobs while the CPS found that the number of persons who
> said they were employed by the government increased by 1.143 million.
> Thus, the CPS government employment growth estimate was nearly identical
> to that of the CES.
>
> [ TABLE 11 ]
>
> Findings from the CES, however, reveal very small increases
> in private sector wage and salary employment in the nation
> over the past five years. The CES found that non-farm,
> private sector payroll employment increased by
> just 665,000 jobs over the past five years.
> In contrast, the CPS household survey estimated that the number of
> persons employed in non-farm, private sector jobs increased by
> 3.026 million. The CPS estimate of non-farm,
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> private sector employment growth between 2000 and 2005
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> was more than five times larger than that estimated
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> by the monthly CES establishment survey.
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> Recent immigrant employment is heavily concentrated
> in the private non-agricultural sector of the nation’s
> labor market. While about three-quarters of all native-born
> workers are employed in private wage and salary jobs,
> 86 percent of recent immigrants report that they work
> for an employer in the private non-farm sector.
>
> Over the past five years, the relationship between the CPS and CES
> estimates of employment growth rates has changed dramatically. Instead
> of observing the pattern of substantially more payroll job growth
> compared to increases in the number of employed persons from the CPS
> prevailing in the 1980s and 1990s, the employment data since 2000 reveal
> much higher growth in employment measured by the CPS relative to the
> slow growth registered by the CES. We also have analyzed the
> relationship between the CPS and CES estimates of job growth at the
> state level over the last five years. Our findings reveal that those
> states that had large increases in the number of employed immigrants
> were also those states with the largest gaps in employment growth
> estimates between the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program
> and the count of jobs from the state CES survey. The LAUS program is a
> statistical program used by states to estimate the monthly number of
> employed and unemployed residents.
>
> For example, the findings in Table 12 reveal that, while the number of
> employed residents in the state of Texas increased by 733,000 between
> 2000 and 2005, total payroll employment levels in the state increased by
> less than half of this amount, rising by just 308,000 over the same
> five-year period. At the same time, the number of new working immigrants
> in the state increased by more than 388,000, the second largest increase
> in the nation. A look at the top-20 states ranked by the size of the
> CES-CPS employment growth gap reveals a fairly strong connection between
> the size of the gap and the size of the increase in the number of new
> immigrants employed in each state. The correlation between the CES-CPS
> employment gap and growth in employed immigrants is quite high. We
> estimate a correlation coefficient of .79 between the absolute size of
> the difference in employment change between the two jobs measures and
> the change in the number of employed immigrants in each state over the
> 2000 to 2005 period.
>
> [ TABLE 12 ]
>
> The above findings imply that large numbers of these new
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> immigrant workers are not appearing on the formal payrolls
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> of their employers. Instead, they are being hired as
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> independent contractors or completely off the books and
> being paid in cash. Evidence from other data sets,
> field research by the authors, and growing media stories
> support this assertion that a high share of new immigrants, especially
> illegal immigrants, are employed in the informal or "black" economy[20].
> In 2003 and 2004, only one-third of new employed immigrants reported
> being covered by a health insurance plan at work and fewer than one in
> five reported that they were covered by a pension plan at work, versus
> nearly one-half of the native-born.21 Among less-educated workers from
> Mexico and Central America, the dominant sources of illegal workers,
> only about 15 percent reported any health insurance coverage from their
> employers. When unemployed, fewer than 10 percent report being covered
> by unemployment insurance benefits.
>
> The employment growth gaps between the CPS and the CES at the national
> level were systematic in nature and specific to particular classes of
> workers. The size of the employment growth gap for the government sector
> of the labor market was quite small. Government was among the least
> important sources of jobs for employed new immigrants and access to
> government jobs is largely confined to formal wage and salary positions.
> Few illegal workers have the opportunity to find work in most government
> organizations. Strict hiring protocols dramatically limit the potential
> use of off-the-books work for many government positions. The
> comparatively small employment growth gap between the household and
> payroll survey for the government sector appears to be the result of
> increasing use of workers as independent consultants by some state and
> local government agencies, a common practice in states such as
> Massachusetts.
>
> In contrast, the CES data reveal little growth in the nation’s non-farm
> private sector wage and salary jobs over the past five years. These
> positions are ones in which the overwhelming majority of employed
> Americans work. They are characterized by a formal employer-employee
> relationship such as that defined in the Social Security Act. Indeed, a
> hallmark of formal payroll jobs is the automatic payroll deductions made
> for employee contributions to the Old Age, Survivors, Disability, and
> Health Insurance trust fund. Yet, in contrast to the very slow private
> sector wage and salary job growth as measured by the CES, the CPS
> reveals non-farm, private wage and salary growth that was 5.5 times
> higher.
>
> We find that the unprecedented gap between the household and payroll
> surveys’ estimates of employment growth over the past five years is
> primarily the result of concentrating new employment growth in
> independent contractor and off-the-books jobs. Employers in many
> sectors, especially construction, landscaping, retail trade, office
> cleaning, and leisure and hospitality industries as well as in private
> households where strong job growth also has been reported in recent
> years, are increasingly re-organizing work to take advantage of the
> substantial influx of new illegal immigrants into the United States
> since 2000. Many of these jobs are filled by illegal immigrants who
> arrive on street corners, informal shape-ups, and convenience store
> parking lots waiting for any of a number of potential employers to come
> by and pick them up for a day’s work.
>
> Increasingly, the nation’s employers seem to be operating outside of the
> legal framework that has defined U.S. labor markets since the New Deal.
> Expansion of contract employment, off-the-books workers, and black labor
> markets in an increasing number of communities throughout the nation has
> meant that a growing fraction of workers now provide their labor outside
> of the fundamental worker protections that the nation had previously
> taken for granted, including wage and hour laws, worker safety and
> health mandates, and minimum wage protections established over the past
> 70 years. These changes in labor relationships also have reduced rates
> of unionization, lowered the share of workers receiving key employee
> benefits, such as health insurance, paid vacations, and pensions and
> have decreased unemployment insurance, Social Security, and workers’
> compensation tax receipts.
>
> The growing inflow of illegal-immigrant workers has contributed to a
> fundamental breakdown in the nation’s labor laws and labor standards as
> the sheer volume of illegal hiring activity overwhelms what has amounted
> to meager enforcement levels of basic labor standards across the nation
> by federal and state officials from both political parties.22 Absent
> renewed efforts to strengthen enforcement of both border security and
> federal and state labor laws, these new forms of work organization will
> continue to grow in the future. The past formal relationships between
> workers and employers will continue to unravel, undermining the
> unemployment insurance and social security systems and basic worker
> protections that have evolved in the nation over the last century. These
> adverse effects on employer-worker relationships have to be taken into
> account in any benefit-cost calculus of the impacts of new immigration.
> Advocates of guestworker programs have been derelict in addressing these
> key economic concerns.
>
> ===========================
>
> End Notes
>
> 1 Jeffrey S. Passel, The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized
> Migrant Population in the U.S.: Estimates Based on the March 2005
> Current Population Survey, Pew Hispanic Center, Washington DC, March 2006.
>
> 2 Our estimates of the size of the immigrant labor force are based on
> applying population shares by age/sex group and labor force
> participation rates for key age/sex groups in the new immigrant
> population to Pew estimates of the number of illegal immigrants for each
> of these age/sex groups.
>
> 3 All of this increase was among native-born males aged 16 to 29. This
> age cohort increased in size by more than 1.6 million. However, this was
> partially offset by a decline of 537,000 in the number of native-born
> persons aged 30 to 34 in the nation.
>
> 4 Steven Camarota found this was the case between foreign-born and
> native-born workers in general: See Steven Camarota, Dropping Out:
> Immigrant Entry and Native Exit from the Labor Market, 2000-2005, Center
> for Immigration Studies, Washington DC, March 2006.
> http://www.cis.org/articles/2006/back206.html
>
> 5 For recent statistical evidence on the links between immigrant worker
> inflows and the employment of native- born workers, See: (i) George
> Borjas, "The Labor Demand Curve is Downward Sloping: Reexamining the
> Impact of Immigration on the Labor Market," Quarterly Journal of
> Economics, November 2003, pp. 1335-1374. (ii) Paulo Tobar, The
> Employment Experiences of Teens in Central City Labor Markets: The
> Influence of Demographic/Human Capital Traits, Family Background, and
> Environmental Factors, M.A. Workshop Paper, Department of Economics,
> Northeastern University, Boston, 2004; (iii) Ishwar Khatiwada, Andrew
> Sum, and Tim Barnicle, New Foreign Immigrant Workers and the Labor
> Market in the United States, February 2006.
>
> 6 See: (i) William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears, Alfred Knopf,
> New York, 1996; (ii) Katherine S. Newman, No Shame in My Game: The
> Working Poor in the Inner City, Russell Sage Foundation, New York, 1999.
>
> 7 The immigration variable is defined as the ratio of the number of new
> immigrant labor force participants in the state between 2000 and 2003 to
> the size of the resident civilian labor force of the state in 2003.
>
> 8 The models are linear probability models estimated by ordinary least
> squares regression techniques. The coefficient on the foreign immigrant
> labor force variable indicates the percentage point change in the
> likelihood of employment among the designated group from a 1 percentage
> point increase in the state’s civilian labor force due to new immigration.
>
> 9 There were 127,151 16-24 year old youth in the ACS sample.
>
> 10 The difference between the coefficients of the new immigrant labor
> force variable in the male and female employment models was large enough
> to be statistically significant at the .01 level.
>
> 11 In fact, the coefficient on the new immigrant labor force variable
> was not statistically significant at the .05 level in the model for
> women with 13 or more years of schooling.
>
> 12 The ACS questionnaire asks respondents whether they had been enrolled
> in school at any time in the prior three months. If they answer "yes" to
> this question, they are classified as enrolled in school. Persons must
> be attending a school or college that will lead to the attainment of a
> regular diploma or a college degree.
>
> 13 The new immigrant worker variable is measured similarly to that for
> the previous models based on the ACS 2003 data. It is the ratio of the
> number of new immigrant labor force participants in 2004 as a percentage
> of the state’s resident labor force in 2004.
>
> 14 The modestly larger coefficient of the immigrant variable in the male
> equation (.022 vs. .019 for women) is not significantly different from
> that of women.
>
> 15 For a review of these changing job market operations in Massachusetts
> and the United States, See: Paul E. Harrington and Andrew Sum, "As Jobs
> Go Off the Books, Immigrants Edge Out Some Native-Born Workers,"
> Commonwealth, Volume 11, Number 2, 2006, pp. 83-90.
>
> 16 For a recent review of conceptual differences between the two
> surveys, See: Mary Bowles and Teresa L. Morisi, "Understanding the
> Employment Measures from the CPS and CES Surveys," Monthly Labor Review,
> February 2006, pp. 23-38.
>
> 17 It is not clear that all off-the-books workers will report their
> employment to the CPS interviewer despite guarantees of confidentiality.
> Besides, immigrants have been historically undercounted in the CPS survey.
>
> 18 Changes in multiple job holding can also be a source of divergent
> growth in employment levels between the two surveys. While important in
> the past, this factor appears to have had little impact on the
> employment estimates of the two surveys during the first half of this
> decade. The number of persons who held multiple jobs remained virtually
> unchanged between 2000 (7.556 million) and 2005 (7.546 million). See:
> U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings, January 2001
> and January 2006, Washington, D.C.
>
> 19 Jeffrey Passel estimates that fewer than 4 percent of all illegal
> workers in the nation worked as agricultural workers in 2005.
>
> 20 See: (i) Naomi R. Kooker, "Hospitality Immigrant Quandary," Boston
> Business Journal, April 2006; (ii) Josh McHugh, "Notes from the
> Underground Economy," www.cnn.money.com , May 30, 2005; (iii) Casey
> Ross, "Contractors: Stop the Illegal Insanity," The Boston Herald, May
> 5, 2006; (iv) Peter Reull, "Shadow Workers: Towns Take Aim at Illegal
> Restaurant Help," The Boston Herald, May 4, 2006; (v) Shawn Sutner,
> "Illegal Immigrants: These Workers Are Often Anxious and in a Constant
> State of Fear," Worcester Telegram, April 16, 2006.
>
> 21 These estimates are based on our analysis of the March 2004 and March
> 2005 CPS work experience supplements, which capture information on
> health insurance and pension coverage.
>
> 22 The Washington Post recently reported that, during 1999, only 182
> employers were prosecuted for unlawfully employing immigrants.
> Remarkably this figure fell to just four prosecutions during 2003. See:
> Spencer S Hsu and Kari Lydersen, "Illegal Hiring Is Rarely Penalized,"
> The Washington Post, June 19, 2006.
>
> =============
>
> Andrew Sum is the Director, Paul Harrington the Associate Director, and
> Ishwar Khatiwada an Associate at the Center for Labor Market Studies at
> Northeastern University.
>
>
> </quote>
>
>
> --
> The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may
> often assume the appearance, and produce the effects,
> of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy.
> --Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"
> nam primi in omnibus proeliis oculi vincuntur.
> ==================================================================
> "Sometimes, Evil drives a mini-van."
> --Desperate Housewives
> --
> It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool
> than to speak foolishness and remove all doubt.
> --Aesop
> The more unnatural anything is, the more it is
> capable of becoming the object of dismal admiration.
> --Thomas Paine, "Age of Reason"
>