Low-Wage U.S. Jobs Get ‘Mexicanized,’ But There’s a Price:
Here at the world’s busiest international crossing point [in San Ysidro, California], 50,000 Mexicans enter the U.S. economy every day. They are permanent workers with green cards who commute from Tijuana, and stay close to Mexico by toiling, legally, in San Diego County as janitors, landscapers and hospital aides.The border also attracts thousands of illegal job seekers every day, few of whom work locally. Rather, they merge into the U.S.’s growing underground economy, whose pool of workers includes an estimated five million undocumented Latinos. With each passing year, many other parts of the U.S. far from the border come to mirror the San Diego labor market.
According to a study being released today by the Pew Hispanic Center, a think tank in Washington, Latino workers accounted for 40% of the 2.5 million jobs created last year, despite comprising barely 15% of the U.S. work force. Even more striking, 88% of the one million new jobs filled by Latinos went to recent immigrants, mainly from Mexico. Dozens of U.S. job categories have become “Mexicanized.” Today, nearly half of all plasterers and stucco masons are foreign-born Latinos, while immigrants hold at least 40% of all jobs in such occupations as garment pressers, drywall installers and ceiling-tile installers.
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“Fifteen years ago nearly 60% of Mexican immigrants worked in California,” says Gordon Hanson, economics professor at the University of California at San Diego. “Today it’s barely 40%.”
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The Pew study supports the theory that immigrants are supplementing the U.S. work force, not pushing native-born Americans out of jobs. Native-born U.S. workers have become better-educated and more ambitious in the past four decades. The percentage without a high-school diploma has dropped to about 9% from 52% in 1960. And these U.S. workers are looking for higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs.
So, we allot 50,000 spaces for legal Mexican workers, but we have five million actually working in the US.