WORKING IMMIGRANTS

The Migration Policy Institute released this brief statement: The effect of the recession on immigrants in the United States has been deepened by the fact that many immigrants share demographic characteristics with the groups most vulnerable during a recession — young people, individuals with lower levels of education, and those who have recently entered the labor force. Foreign-born workers are also overrepresented in the industries that have been hit the hardest during the recession, such as construction, manufacturing, leisure and hospitality, and support and personal services.

In particular, those from Mexico and Central America have been affected disproportionately. Many worked in the construction industry, which started collapsing after the housing bubble burst in late 2006.

In addition, many recent refugees, including those from Iraq, have struggled to find work due to the recession. Their precarious situation prompted advocacy groups to criticize the funding of US refugee resettlement programs and to point to the lack of sensitivity shown to this group's vulnerability during an economic downturn.

These impacts have been lessened to some extent by the fact that immigrants are generally more flexible about changing jobs and geographic locations than are native-born workers.

The sluggish economy has also made the United States less attractive for those seeking economic opportunities. Data suggest that immigration to the United States began to slow in late 2007 and that flows of unauthorized immigrants have decreased significantly.

However, there is no evidence that the recession has caused a substantial wave of returns to Mexico. Over the last year, the size of the unauthorized population, of which the largest share (59 percent) is Mexican, has decreased only slightly, from an estimated 12.1 million in July 2008 to 11.9 million in August 2009.

In an interesting twist, anecdotal evidence suggests that some Mexican families have sent money to support their family members in the United States.

Another impact of the recession has been decreased demand for H-1B temporary visas for highly skilled workers. In previous years, the 65,000 cap has been reached within the first few days the visas become available (see Figure 4). The cap for fiscal year 2010 was not met until December 21, 2009 — nearly nine months after employers were eligible to file fiscal year 2010 petitions.

The Migration Policy Institute reports that a new program by the Mexican government to support its citizens residing in the U.S. “represents one of the most significant, if overlooked, factors in US immigrant integration policy” today. As one third of all immigrants in the U.S. are Mexican, this initiative may well serve as a model for other countries with large numbers of citizens residing here.

The program even provides medical care to illegal immigrants.

The January 2010 report’s title is “Protection through Integration: The Mexican Government’s Efforts to Aid Migrants in the United States”

The report’s executive summary (further below in full): says:

“In recent years, the Mexican government has moved beyond traditional notions of consular protection by establishing a broad institutional structure, the Institute of Mexicans Abroad (Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior or IME), to deliver an array of civic, health, education, and financial services to its migrants — 95 percent of whom live in the United States.”

Also,

“While evaluations of IME’s programs remain scarce, its projects offer a number of potential best practices in areas ranging from distance learning, outreach, civic engagement, and health care. We recommend sustaining and broadening evaluation and assessment of these programs. This is especially critical as other sending countries, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay, look to Mexico as a model for providing services to its diaspora and other recipient countries look to work with sending countries to make migration work for all participants.”

The Executive Summary in full:

Mexican consular officials safeguard and protect the interests of their nationals in the United States, performing many of the same functions as any other diplomatic staff in a foreign country. As an immigrant-sending country, Mexico also offers its nationals in the United States low-cost transfer rates for remittances and programs that match migrant investment in communities of origin dollar for dollar.

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Work injuries sustained by an illegal worker often lead into a legal labyrinth ending up, usually, with the worker being granted some or all the benefits allowed by a state’s workers compensation system. This Florida case fits the mold.

As reported by WorkCompCentral (subscription required) Angel Miranda was injured in July 2008. His employer paid him under the table for his disability.

When the employer stopped its payments, he filed a workers compensation claim. Only problem: he had no formal record of having earned a wage, presumably he had been paid in cash, and to award disability benefits a worker has to show evidence of what he was paid. Miranda tried to remedy the situation by filing in April 2009 a tax return for 2008. A workers compensation judge awarded Miranda disability benefits; the decision was upheld of appeal.

Whether he was later deported or not the news article did not say.

The article:

Illegal Alien's Tax Return Entitled Him to Benefits:

An illegal alien's filing of a tax return with the Internal Revenue Service entitled him to workers' compensation benefits, Florida's 1st District Court of Appeal ruled.

Case: JBD Brother's and Masonry Inc., et al. v. Miranda, No. 1D09-3402, 1/25/10, published.

Facts: Angel Miranda was an illegal alien from Mexico who has lived in the United States since 2000. In 2008, he began working as a forklift driver and laborer for JBD Brother's and Masonry. Miranda was injured in July 2008, when he fell from a scaffold at the employer's job site in Miami.

The employer failed to immediately report the accident to its workers' compensation carrier, and instead, agreed to make "under the table" payments for Miranda's medical care and lost time until he recuperated. When the employer halted the payments in September 2008, Miranda retained an attorney and filed a petition for benefits.

The employer responded by reporting the accident to its carrier, which accepted the accident and injury as compensable. However, the carrier denied indemnity benefits because there was no record of Miranda ever having reported his wages to the Internal Revenue Service.

In April 2009, Miranda and his attorney filed forms reporting his 2008 income to the IRS, and seeking an individual taxpayer identification number.

Procedural History: The parties stipulated that Miranda's reported income equated to an average weekly wage of $480. However, the employer argued that because Miranda failed to file the correct forms with complete information to the IRS, he failed to properly report his income and therefore failed to establish his wages for purposes of calculating an AWW.

The judge of compensation claims rejected this argument, and awarded temporary total disability benefits.

The appellate judges concluded that Miranda was entitled to workers' compensation benefits despite the allegation that his tax return may have had some technical flaws. The court based this upon another Jan. 25, 2010, decision, which is named Rene Stone Work Corp. v. Gonzalez.

In that decision, the court concluded that an employee simply needs to report his or her income to the IRS to become entitled to benefits, and rejected arguments that the tax return needs to be technically precise.

Source: WorkCompCentral

“Immigrant, Inc.” is a new book profiling how immigrants are creating new jobs, products and services by their entrepreneurship. Congratulations to the co-authors for highlighting this aspect of immigration. We see once again why we call America a country of immigrants. For a quick introduction to the book, click on this Youtube site:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Immigrantinc2010

Shocking, but not surprising, news about immigrant detention centers: officials have covered up deaths. The New York Times published an article which can only be called angry – angry at officials who had lied to its reporters in the past, even as these officials conspired to cover up the causes of death. “officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.”

I hope this leads to $100 million in payments to grieving family survivors.

The article in full:

Officials Hid Truth About Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

Continue reading "Expose of criminal behavior by immigration detention officials" »

I posted in December on a survey conducted on low wage (about $8 an hour) immigration and native American labor in several cities. This article in the LA Times addresses the findings in that area. “The study found that almost nine out of 10 low-wage workers surveyed in Los Angeles County had recently experienced some form of pay-related workplace violation, or "wage theft." Almost one in three reported being paid less than the minimum wage and nearly 80% said they had not received legally mandated overtime.”

“Only 4.3% of Los Angeles respondents who had experienced a serious on-the-job injury during the previous three years had filed a workers' compensation claim to pay for medical care or missed days of work, the study found.”

The article in full:
By Patrick J. McDonnell

January 6, 2010

Low-wage workers in the Los Angeles area are even more likely than their counterparts in New York and Chicago to suffer violations of minimum wage, overtime and other labor laws, according to a new UCLA study being released today.

The study found that almost nine out of 10 low-wage workers surveyed in Los Angeles County had recently experienced some form of pay-related workplace violation, or "wage theft." Almost one in three reported being paid less than the minimum wage and nearly 80% said they had not received legally mandated overtime.

"We knew these violations were happening, but we never really imagined it was as prevalent as this study demonstrates," said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist and principal author of the study, conducted by UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Continue reading "Poor labor protections for low wage labor in Los Angeles" »

The New York Times started off the 2010 season of campaigning for immigration reform in an editorial. Nothing substantively new from 2009, when the reform issue seemed buried six feet under. I don’t hold out much hope for much constructive action this year.

Immigration’s New Year

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, at his inauguration, pledged to help the Obama administration pass immigration reform. Mr. Bloomberg is a force to reckon with, as he proved with his national campaign against illegal guns. On the same day, four young people in Miami, current or former students at Miami Dade College, began their own determined march to Washington in an effort to bring pressure from the grass roots.

Three of the four were brought to this country illegally as children. Like thousands of other young people, they bear no blame for their status, and they are frustrated that their hard work and bright promise lead to a brick wall. Their protest for a chance to become Americans is courageous because it exposes them to possible arrest and deportation. “We are risking our future because our present is unbearable,” one of them, Felipe Matos, told The Times.

Continue reading "NY Times editorial on immigration reform" »

I came across this article dated April 18, 2008. Some of the loss of immigrant households mayt of course have been due to the economy. Nonetheless it shows the extent to which local areas can be economically heavily dependent on low-income immigrants.

A local governing board unanimously enacted a law which fines businesses for hiring and real estate owners from renting to illegal immigrants.

“A hamlet of about 8,000 situated across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, Riverside is just one of more than 30 small towns and suburbs across the country that have recently enacted immigration ordinances, including Escondido, Calif.; Farmers Branch, Texas; and Valley Park, Mo. At the same time, statewide laws that punish business owners for employing illegal immigrants have been passed in Arizona, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.”

The article in full:

How illegal immigration is dividing a town's business owners
In Riverside, N.J., a crackdown that drove away a third of the town's population has some businesses struggling to survive the loss.

RIVERSIDE, N.J. (FORTUNE Small Business) -- A barbershop quartet sings "The Girl From Ipanema" in Portuguese on a television dialed to a Brazilian satellite channel inside Pavilion Barbecue, where the air is piquant with the aroma of the house specialty, frango de churrasco - slow-roasted chicken braised in red chili sauce.

Continue reading "How a New Jersey town lost one third of its population due to a crackdown" »

The Migration Policy Institute issued in November a study of “The Economics and Policy of Illegal Immigration in the United States”, by Gordon H. Hanson of University of California-San Diego. Hanson is an expert in transnational immigration. Illegal immigrant workers, now numbering about 8.3 million, are mostly from Mexico and mostly have not completed high school. How do these illegal workers fit into the American economy? Hanson asks.

He writes that illegal immigrants add 0.03% to the gross domestic product, and cost 0.1% in educational and healthcare expenses (by far the leading economic burdens these worker households impose). This means they are a 0.7% drag on the economy, or about $10 billion. Border control expenses of the federal government is $9.5 billion.

He writes that they make up much of the ranks of poorly educated workers. “Over the last 50 years, the United States has raised the education level of its adult population dramatically. Whereas in 1960 half of US-born working-age adults had not completed high school, today the figure is just 8 percent….Forty- seven percent of unauthorized immigrants between 25 and 64 years of age have not completed the equivalent of a US high school education; they account for 20 percent of working-age adults in the United States with less than a high school degree.

“In 2008, they represented 25 percent of farm workers, 19 percent of building and maintenance staff, 17 percent of construction labor, 12 percent of employees in food preparation and serving, 10 percent of production labor, and 5 percent of the total civilian labor force.”

(These figures are from Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States (Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center, 2009).

Expanded auditing by Feds of employer practices has become a facet of the Obama Administration’s approach toward enforcement of immigration laws. It has stepped aside from the show-boating by ICE during the Bush Administration. The New York Times ran an article last month on this evolving strategy.

Immigration Officials to Audit 1,000 More Companies

By NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: November 19, 2009

WASHINGTON — Immigration enforcement officials said Thursday that they were expanding a program for auditing companies that might have hired illegal immigrants and had notified 1,000 companies this week that they would have to undergo such a review.

John Morton, who heads Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, announced the new initiative, saying it was part of the administration’s plan to deal with companies that hire illegal workers. “ICE is focused on finding and penalizing employers who believe they can unfairly get ahead by cultivating illegal workplaces,” Mr. Morton said.

He said that because the program was a law enforcement operation, he would not identify the companies that would undergo an audit except to say that they had been selected as a result of investigative leads and their connection to public safety and national security.

The language suggests the audits will affect private companies involved in infrastructure operations like gas and electric utilities and contractors on military bases but not retailers and manufacturers of nonessential goods.

Continue reading "Expanded auditing of American employers re: illegal workers" »