09/27/2006
When I took this job at VDARE.COM, I was assured there would be no math. As I have mentioned before, I failed every statistics course I ever took…some more than once.
In spite of my mathematical ineptitude, even I understood (and was startled by) the numbers from the new Latino Labor Report issued this morning by the Pew Hispanic Research Center.
How many times have we been told that illegal immigrants (usually referred to as "foreign-born workers" or as I like to call them "likely Democrat voters") are not taking jobs away from American workers?
They do the jobs nobody else will do…we need them…Americans are lazy…blah, blah, blah.
Right…and how they only take the back-breaking jobs in the agriculture industry such as picking lettuce or shaking nut trees — and of course this information comes to us almost subliminally via the not-so-subtle but always maudlin Mainstream Media (MSM) in stories that say something like this:
Little 12 year-old Maria — who lives in a one room apartment with the 15 relatives she supports with her meager $2/hr wage — sustained a concussion when she fell from the top of a twenty foot walnut tree…in other news, there will be no lettuce this year thanks to increased border security measures…Hollywood "Activist" Sean Penn is organizing a vegetarian march in Washington later this week.
As such, it may surprise you to hear (actually it won’t because you've been reading VDARE.COM’s Eddy Rubenstein) that this kind of comment is — to put it politely — untrue.
According to the Latino Labor Report,
The Pew report does not at any point make reference to illegal immigrants. But it does use the term "foreign-born" which (when referring to Hispanics) very often means the same thing.
Over the previous 12-month period, the "overall employment" for Latinos increased by 993,000 — that’s an increase of 5.3% in one year.
Interestingly enough, the report mentions that, while Hispanics make up only 13% of the U.S. labor force, they accounted for 37% of the total increase in employment.
Hmm…so all those new jobs created in the Bush recovery — they're going to whom? Americans? Yeah, not so much.
And all these new "foreign-born" workers are flocking to the lettuce fields and saving us from starvation, right? Again — not so much:
"Foreign-born Hispanics had the most job gains in construction (417,000), followed by business and professional services (179,000). Together, those two industries accounted for almost three-quarters (74%) of all jobs gained by foreign born Latinos between 2005 and 2006."
(By the way, the "Business and Professional Services" category may sound like " doctors and lawyers" but actually includes " janitorial and landscaping services.")
Crikey, since 2003 more than one million foreign-born Latinos have found jobs in the construction industry alone.
Between 2003 and 2006, 9 out of 10 construction jobs (93%) picked up by Latinos went to foreign-born workers.
Gee, I wonder why that is?…
Maybe this is the reason: The report maintains that while there has been an overall wage increase for Latinos, "foreign-born Hispanics, the dominant factor in the Latino labor pool, experienced a decline in the median wage."
Talk about a plot twist…I never would have guessed that accepting lower wages was behind the Hispanic employment spurt!
As Congress continues to debate the issue, hopefully there will be at least one Member who reads this latest report (or has it read to them) before they vote on any "guest worker" bill.
Here’s a hint:
We don’t need anymore guest workers…we need American workers!
Bryanna Bevens is a political consultant and former chief of staff for a member of the California State Assembly.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.