Immigrant Workers Are Critical To America’s Future Growth.

As more than 60 million Americans in their prime working years grow older and retire in the next 30 years, foreign-born workers will be needed to fill job openings and provide critical skills to the U.S. labor market, according to an analysis by the Employment Policy Foundation.

“Immigration has always been important to the U.S. workplace,” said EPF President Ed Potter. “Today, foreign-born workers provide 12 percent of the total hours worked in a week. Without their contributions, the output of goods and services in our nation would be at least $1 trillion less. Future economic growth will depend on the having enough immigrant workers with the needed skills.”

Between 1994 and 2000, the total U.S. labor force grew by 10 million, with nearly 4.7 million supplied by foreign-born residents, according to EPF review of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. During that time, unemployment for both groups fell dramatically. The native-born unemployment rate went from 6.3 percent to 4 percent, and foreign-born unemployment improved from 8.3 percent to 4.4 percent.

American and immigrant workers have benefited from bigger paychecks as well. For both groups, earnings grew more than 32 percent in the past six years. In March 2000, the typical full-time employee earned $34,990 per year, while the typical foreign-born worker earned $31,971.

What was striking, Potter said, was that foreign- and native-born workers tended to complement each other in the job market. As native-born Americans seek better education and careers, they tend to avoid jobs in the manual labor service industries. Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that immigrants fill a growing share of low-skill jobs. About 1.1 million new lower-skilled immigrants in the labor force have filled the gap since 1994 as the native-born population attracted to such jobs has declined from 9 million to 7.6 million.

Immigrants also provide an important resource to meet the growing demand for highly skilled college-educated managers, technical specialists and professionals. Since 1994, the number of foreign-born college graduates in the labor force has increased 43.8 percent to 4.6 million.

“The long-term trend shows that there will be continuing job opportunities for both native- and foreign-born workers over the next 30 years,” Potter said. “Employment policy, however, has failed to keep up with this new economic reality.”

U.S. immigration policy continues to limit the number of permanent and temporary workers into the country. That policy was created based on a presumption that foreign-born labor is a threat to the job security and incomes of native-born workers. The application process to enter the United States often discourages potential employers from recruiting foreign-born employees despite the need for more workers.

To read EPF’s analysis CLICK below (Adobe Acrobat required):

http://www.epf.org/research/newsletters/2001/pb20010608.pdf