The Pink Flamingo :: Hispanic Unemployment on the Rise

The latest reports are that unemployment is at 5.5 percent, over-all. At the same time Latino unemployment reached 7.3%. Is there a connection between immigration reform, hard-line anti-immigration sentiment, and the more recent anti-illegal raids and the higher Hispanic unemployment rates? If legal immigrants and Hispanics who are American citizens are paying the price for this strange version of national security, isn’t something wrong?

What is the bottom line here?
How many of these people are registered to vote?
How many of them voted Republican once upon a time?
How many are going to vote Republican now?

There are consequences to every action, unintended consequences. Do you really want to live with these?

In 2007, according to the Pew Hispanic Center

“…Employment growth for Latinos was cut in half in 2007. Latinos gained 329,000 jobs between the first quarters of 2007 and 2008, an increase of 1.7%. That compared with 734,000 new jobs in the preceding one-year period, an increase of 3.9%. The Hispanic employment rate fell from 64.5% in the first quarter of 2007 to 63.3% in the first quarter of 2008. Hispanic immigrants, while accounting for almost all of the increase in Hispanic unemployment, secured few (21%) of the new jobs going to Hispanics (70,000 out of 329,000). The leading sources of jobs growth for Hispanics were business services (203,000 new jobs) and hospital and other health services (170,000 new jobs). …Immigrants who arrived in 2000 or later face a much harder task finding and keeping jobs than they did over the past few years. In previous reports, the Pew Hispanic Center has documented the key role of the construction industry in absorbing newly arrived Latino immigrants (Kochhar, 2006 and Kochhar, 2007). The unemployment rate for immigrants who arrived in 2000 or later years now stands close to the double-digit mark, increasing from 7.1% in the first quarter of 2007 to 9.3% in the first quarter of 2008 (Table 7). But the economic slowdown did not spare Latino immigrants who arrived in earlier periods. For example, the unemployment rate of immigrants who arrived between 1990 and 1999 rose from 5.4% in the first quarter of 2007 to 8.2% in the first quarter of 2008; for those who arrived between 1980 and 1990, it went up from 3.7% to 6.1%...”

What does immigration reform have to do with Latino job loss?

“…"These numbers highlight how much the Latino community is being disproportionately affected by the current economic crisis," said Rep. Joe Baca (D-Rialto), head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. "The Latino community not only has to contend with our weakened economy but also with an increasingly negative immigration debate -- neither of which brings good news for Latino unemployment rates." The Pew report attributes the majority of Latino job losses to the slump in the construction industry. But Kochhar acknowledged enforcement raids might be a factor. "Economic downturns tend to reduce immigration flows . . . but we can't point to a cause and effect," he said.

Latinos make up 14.2% of the U.S. labor force, and just over half of working-age Latinos are immigrants, the report said. Although Pew researchers were not able to identify the legal status of those immigrant workers, they estimated that illegal immigrants accounted for 5% of the U.S. labor force.

Most illegal immigrants are from Latin America, and Mexicans account for about 55% of the total, the report said. Amid a downturn in the construction sector, the report found that 90% of Latino job losses in construction were experienced by immigrants. And although wages for Latinos fell in all sectors, Latino construction workers experienced the sharpest drop, earning less now than they did in the first quarter of 2006.

Latino women left the labor force in greater proportion and were much more likely to be unemployed than Latino men, the Pew report said. Kochhar said Latino women historically had far lower levels of participation in the workforce than non-Latino women.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said their raids were prompting employers to think twice about hiring illegal immigrants….”