Following up on my posting earlier today, I found the link to all the articles in the series on immigrant labor in New Bedford and surrounding Southeastern Massachusetts. Here it is.
This is possibly the best depiction of the lives of recent low income immigrants published by an American newspaper.

The New Bedford, MA, Standard-Times should get an award for its series on immigrant labor (legal and illegal) starting this week. Go here for the series (the website is called “South Coast today”). New Bedford was the site of one of the early ICE raids on March 6, 2007. Thanks to Shuya Ohno of the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition for alerting me to the series.
Following are what the reporters learned in preparing the series:
THE NEW IMMIGRANTS
What we learned in our investigation
A nearly two-year-long Standard-Times investigation of legal and illegal immigration from Central America found that:
— Violent crime, low wages and a lack of jobs have driven as many as 8,000 Central Americans to migrate to New Bedford.
— U.S. wages sent home to Guatemala are lifting families out of poverty, but also contributing to drug use and gang activity on the island.
— Many Central American immigrants, documented or not, obtain jobs through temporary agencies on the New Bedford waterfront and the conditions they work under don’t match what most American workers enjoy.
— The everyday lives of New Bedford’s illegal immigrants are dominated by a constant fear of being caught by immigration officials.
— Illegal immigrants who are deported back home to Guatemala are at high risk for depression and alcoholism.
— Temporary agencies have taken over much of the hiring for New Bedford fish houses and light manufacturing, often employing illegal immigrants in an off-the-books, cash economy in the recent past.
— A Taunton employment agency defrauded the federal and state governments, as well as worker’s compensation insurance companies, of millions of dollars in taxes, unemployment insurance contributions and worker’s compensation insurance compensation related to business in New Bedford, particularly on the waterfront.
— Some immigrant workers say they are forced to work overtime without being paid time-and-half. In two cases, a well-respected seafood processing plant agreed as part of a court settlement to pay Central American immigrants thousands in overtime claims.
— Guatemalan Mayans and some Latino immigrants claim they have been singled out for discrimination by employers. They claim they have been given the worst jobs within their seafood houses and factories, the least benefits and working conditions, and laid off before they can accrue better wages or vacations.
— Contrary to popular belief, most immigrants who came to New Bedford in the early 20th century faced no restrictions on legal immigration. Many Portuguese immigrants came to the U.S. on tourist visas and simply stayed to work afterwards.
— Religion — both Catholic and evangelical — plays a strong role in the lives of many of today’s immigrants, just as it did for past immigrant groups.
— A backlash among Americans — many of them immigrants or their children or grandchildren believe that new immigrants are undermining American wages and working conditions, and new immigrants are not obeying the law.
— The challenge of educating immigrant children, always a factor in the cities of the SouthCoast, becomes even greater in an age of mandatory testing and the ever-increasing expectations of No Child Left Behind.
— New Bedford’s new immigrants remain vulnerable to crime, raising concerns that Central American gangs will gain a toehold in the city.
— Some Central American immigrants are living out the American Dream in New Bedford.
— Central American entrepreneurs could revitalize local neighborhoods by opening restaurants, markets and other businesses that cater to new immigrants.

The New York Times reported on 6/19/08 that “ European Union lawmakers voted Wednesday to allow undocumented migrants to be held in detention centers for up to 18 months and banned from European Union territory for five years.
Criticized by groups like Amnesty International as “severely flawed” and an erosion of human rights standards, the so-called return directive was passed in the European Parliament here by a 369-to-197 vote, with 106 legislators abstaining.
Amnesty International said it was “deeply disappointed” by the outcome of the vote, and appealed to member states currently applying higher standards not to use the directive as a pretext for lowering them.
The Europe Union has freedom of movement among 25 of its 27 member states but no overarching policy on immigration. Supporters see the new measure as a means to unify a patchwork of systems governing treatment of migrants who overstay their visas or who, in far lesser numbers, slip clandestinely across borders.”
Previously, the EU did not have a uniform set of laws to govern how illegal immigrants are to be treated.
The article in full:

Continue reading EU toughens stance on illegal immigrants

When the Swift beef processing plant in tiny Cactus, TX, was raided in late 2006 (I have posted on this) hundreds of illegal Hispanic workers were carted off. For months the plant was barely operational. No workers in its rural surroundings. Then it started to bus workers in from Amarillo, 60 miles away. It recruited two Burmese workers from Amarillo. Then Swift tapped into the Burmese community in Houston, relocating them to Cactus. State officials leaned on Swift to provide adequate housing. 100 Burmese kids started school.
This story occurred because Swift like other meat processors located large plants in rural towns to lower wage scales – and to draw in immigrant labor, legal or illegal.
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reported today on how the Burmese got to Cactus.
The article in full:

Continue reading Burmese workers replace illegal meat processing workers

Mexican workers who work in the U.S.
I was asked the other day about the source of the estimate that a large share of Mexico’s labor force works in the U.S. The source in the Migration Policy Institute, in a publication dated November 2006. “MPI estimates that 9.4 percent of all persons born in Mexico lived in the United States in 2005. In the same year, 14 percent of Mexican workers were engaged in the US labor force compared to 2.5 percent of Canadian workers.”
The report goes on: “According to Inter-American Development Bank estimates, remittances sent in 2001 by Mexicans working abroad totaled $8.9 billion. By 2005, this amount more than doubled and reached more than $20 billion, a lion’s share of which came from the United States. Mexico remains the largest recipient of remittances among all Latin American countries, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the total $53.6 billion sent to Latin America. In 2005, remittances equaled to 2.8 percent of Mexico’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).”
Also go to my post, “Why poorer educated Mexican men come work in the United States.”

Recently I posted about the Migration Policy Institute’s large database on immigration in the U.S. On the right column you can find this posting listed as “a mass of…”. I am excerpting here the MPI’s summary for the country as a whole. At the website, you can drill down to find data for each state.
* Immigrants were one in six US workers employed in the civilian labor force (age 16 and older) in 2006, one in eight in 2000, and less than one in 10 in 1990. In California, immigrants comprised more than a third of the state’s employed workforce in 2006 compared to less than 2 percent in Montana.
* More than one-fifth of the 22 million immigrant workers in the United States are recent arrivals (i.e., those who arrived between 2000 and 2006);
* More than half of all immigrant workers in the US civilian labor force in 2006 were born in Latin America and slightly more than a quarter were from Asia. The rest originated in Europe (11.8 percent), Africa (3.8 percent), Northern America (2.0 percent), and Oceania/other (0.4 percent).
* In 2006, 45.7 percent of US total civilian employed workers (native and immigrant) were limited English proficient (LEP). The share of the labor force that was LEP was higher in Nebraska (56.7 percent) and Arkansas (54.7 percent) and much lower in Maine (19.9 percent) and Montana (17.6 percent).

This is the message from a study about New York City chidren of immigrants, as reported in the NY Times. The study shows how assimilation into the education system and labor market varies by country of origin. “A decade-long study of adult children of immigrants to the New York region has concluded that they are rapidly entering the mainstream and doing better than their parents in terms of education and earnings — even outperforming native-born Americans in many cases.”
The study was published as “Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age,” by Harvard University Press.
The data are old – based on survey work done and followed up on between 1999 and 2003. The following groups were studied: Dominicans, Chinese, Russian Jews, South Americans (consisting of Colombians, Ecuadoreans and Peruvians) and West Indians. The Chinese children are doing best and the Dominican children from the West Indies are doing worse.
The article in full:

Continue reading Second generation immigrants doing well – study in New York City

It is more than interesting – it is engrossing – to compare the policies of the U.S. and Canada with respect to Hispanic immigrant worker policy. I have posted on this before. This article describes how Canada is coping with labor shortages arising out of a booming economy.
It reports that “A Canada-Mexico working group on labour mobility was announced by Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier and his Mexican counterpart, Patricia Espinosa, after the North American Leaders’ Summit in Montebello, Que., last August. As the visiting workers program is expanded, the group will deal with developing a certification process that provides Canadian employers with the assurance that a bricklayer or welder will meet their specifications, as well as defining the length of temporary stays.
Currently, more than 100 National Employment Service offices throughout Mexico recruit workers and maintain a data bank, vetting applicants for appropriate work experience. They then match their data with requests from employers across Canada, funnelled through the Human Resources and Social Development ministry. The number of potential job placements in Canada can be as high as 800,000, said Jorge Rodriguez, Chief of International Affairs at Mexico’s Labour Secretariat.”
The article in full:

Continue reading Canada recruiting Mexican labor

Canada is one of several countries, such as Australia, with an aggressive strategy to woo immigrants in order to grow jobs and the economy. A Canadian news service reports that “Canada is heading for a problem seems unavoidable. In the last 50 years, Canada’s workforce grew by 200 per cent. That growth was responsible for raising standards of living and creating the public and private wealth the country now enjoys. But government forecasters say that, without some radical changes, the workforce will only grow by 11 per cent in the next 50 years – and that figure includes the effects of current levels of immigration.
‘Our demographics are working against us,’ Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg said in a speech Monday to the Canadian Building and Construction Trades’ Legislative Conference. ‘Baby boomers are set to retire and our low birth rate means demand for workers will soon outstrip supply.”
* British Columbia will be short 350,000 workers over the next 12 years.
* Alberta will require 100,000 workers over the next 10 years.
* Ontario will need 560,000 more workers by 2030.
* Quebec will have 1.3 million job openings by 2016.
The article in full:
Canada’s top problem is filling labour shortage
By David Akin
The Canwest News Service (Canada), May 5, 2008
Ottawa — When Prime Minister Stephen Harper gathered the country’s premiers at 24 Sussex Drive last fall, he wanted them to focus on what he saw as the country’s No. 1 economic problem: within a decade or two, there simply will not be enough workers in the country.
Although recent headlines about thousands of layoffs in Canada’s struggling manufacturing sector may suggest otherwise, Harper and his cabinet are struggling to find ways to boost training programs and increase immigration to find more workers to avoid what some Conservative strategists say is an ‘economic time bomb.’

Continue reading Canada needs more immigrant workers

the Migration Information Institute issued this FAQ document last year, in October 2007. It is extensive. Go through all of it to find what you are looking for. It covers demographics, workforce and geographic distribution, countries of origin, unionization,
immigration status, deportations, naturalization, etc.
Its website has a motherlode of studies about immigration.
By Aaron Terrazas, Jeanne Batalova, Velma Fan, of the Migration Policy Institute

Continue reading A mass of data about immigrants in the U.S.