Immigrants gain over U.S. workers

Immigrant workers have gained jobs since the recession ended, while native-born Americans continued to lose work, a new report finds.

The Pew Hispanic Center released a report Friday that shows foreign-born residents gained 656,000 jobs from June 2009 to June 2010. At the same time, workers born in the country lost 1.2 million jobs.


The report said reasons for the huge gap are unclear. But it suggested that immigrants are more likely to take low-paid jobs because some of them aren’t eligible for unemployment benefits.

“It might be that in the search for jobs in the recovery, immigrants were more accepting of lower wages and reduced hours because many, especially unauthorized immigrants, are not eligible for unemployment benefits,” it says.

The report doesn’t break down how many jobs are filled by legal immigrants, as compared with illegal ones.

It also found that while immigrants are getting more jobs than nonimmigrant workers, they’re suffering from sharp declines in earnings. From June 2009 to June 2010, median weekly earnings for immigrants dropped 4.5 percent, but only less than 1 percent for workers born here.

The issue of American jobs being filled by immigrant workers, or outsourced to other countries, has captivated this election cycle. Republicans argue that illegal immigrants are taking jobs that U.S. citizens are willing to do, while Democrats say that the real problem is U.S. companies outsourcing manufacturing jobs to India and China, among other countries.

The report is based on numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Labor Department.