Unemployment at Record High for Immigrants
A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies, an independent, non-partisan research institution that examines the impact of immigration on the United States, finds that immigrants have been harder hit by the recession than U.S. natives. Unemployment among immigrants (legal and illegal) was higher in the first quarter of 2009 than at any time since 1994, when immigrant data was first collected separately. This represents a change from the recent past, when native-born Americans had the higher unemployment rate.
The report, entitled, "Trends in Immigrant and Native Employment," is co-authored by Dr. Steven Camarota, the director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, and Karen Jensenius, a research demographer at the Center. According to the report, a major reason for the more rapid increase in immigrant unemployment is that they tend to be employed in occupations hit hard by the recession. However, the larger increase in unemployment for educated immigrants is harder to explain. The states with the largest decline in immigrant employment are Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Minnesota, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Florida, Connecticut, Virginia and California. Native-born job losses also have been significant in most of these states.
Among the findings:
- Immigrant unemployment in the first quarter of 2009 was 9.7%, the highest level since 1994, when data began to be collected for immigrants. The current figure for natives is 8.6%, also the highest since 1994.
- The immigrant unemployment rate is now 5.6 percentage points higher than in the third quarter of 2007, before the recession began. Native unemployment has increased 3.8 percentage points over the same period.
- Among immigrants who have arrived since the beginning of 2006, unemployment is 13.3%.
- The number of unemployed immigrants increased 1.3 million (130%) since the third quarter of 2007. Among natives the increase was five million (81%).
- The number of immigrants holding a job dropped 2.1 million (9%) from the third quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of this year. For natives, the drop was 4.5 million (4%).
