Experts Untie the Immigration and Unemployment Knot
New Research Shows Differences between Immigrant Workers and Unemployed Natives
August 17, 2009
Washington, DC - Today, the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) released the third
and final installment of a three-part report, Untying the Knot, which seeks
to debunk the frequently misrepresented relationship between immigration and
unemployment. The final report, by Rob Paral and Associates, reveals that unemployed
natives and employed recent immigrants cannot simply be "swapped"
for one another since unemployed natives and employed immigrants tend to have
different levels of education, live in different parts of the country, and have
experience in different occupations and different levels of work experience.
The report also shows that immigrants tend to fit into the labor force in areas
where there are insufficient numbers of comparable native workers. In other
words, removing immigrants would not automatically lead to job openings for
natives.
The two previous Untying the Knot reports, also prepared by Rob Paral and Associates,
examine data from the Census Bureau and find that there is no apparent relationship
between the number of recent immigrants in a particular locale and the unemployment
rate among native-born whites, blacks, Latinos, or Asians. Even now, at a time
of economic recession and high unemployment, there is no correlation between
the number of recent immigrant workers in a given state, county, or city and
the unemployment rate among native-born workers.
"With the release of the final installment of Untying the Knot, policymakers
now have a wider set of data that will help them distinguish fact from fiction
when it comes to setting immigration policy," stated Mary Giovagnoli, Director
of the Immigration Policy Center. "This third installment further establishes
that there are no simple correlations between levels of unemployment and the
presence of immigrant workers in a community. The report challenges the assumption
that all native-born and immigrant workers are interchangeable or compete for
the same jobs and instead shows that immigrant workers, more often than not,
tend to complement the native-born worker within a particular job market."