The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions held hearings on September 14 to explore the merits of skills based point system for managing much of permanent immigration. Canada has been using such a system for years. Here is what I gleaned from a presentation by Queen’s University professor Charles M. Beach.
Beach said that Canada has “the highest per capita immigration rate in the world” – about 225,000 persons per years out of a population of 30 million. Our legal permanent immigration is somewhat under a million a year; Canada’s rate is over double of ours.
Canada has three immigration tracks: economic, family, and humanitarian (mainly refugees). The economic track has grown relatively to the others as Canada’s immigration rate has grown from the 1980s. The economic category accounted for 35% of immigrants in 1980, but 59% in 2000.
The country’s Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) has considerable legal latitude to set target levels and make changes to the skills base system.
This system was introduced in 1967. Originally it was focused in part on trying to target immigration to meet periodic labor gaps, but that approach being cumbersome was abandoned towards a more generic skills scoring protocol. It had an effect: changes early in the 1990s led to a large increase in the rate of higher educated immigrants. The strategy: don’t fill labor shortages, but foster labor productivity and growth.
Since the mid 1990s, three factors in the scoring system dominant: education, age and French/English fluency. Maximum points for these categories respectively are a four year university degree, 21 – 49 age range, and fluency in both languages. If you get these maximum points you earn 59 of the 70 out of a 100 points you need for acceptance. Of these factors, education carries the greatest weight.
Douglas S. Massey of Princeton University also testified. I have posted on him before and find his a voice of reason. Massey noted that employment based immigration is about 20% of total American immigration. We gave much more weight to family affiliations. Canada and Australia have more employment-focused immigration policies needed to compete with the United States. We don’t need such a system. “In the long run, the primary source of America’s stock of skills, talents and education must come from investments made init sown human capital” – through education, training and research. Immigration to Massey is a “poor substitute” for investments in education and training. Massey also noted that many immigrants have problems earning enough, and that the highest educated immigrants are not necessarily the happiest. Massey recommended, in effect, an approach which balances employment focused immigration policy with one of family integration and fuller implementation of the population aspects of NAFTA.
How an ICE raid crippled a rural Georgia town
The New York Times carried an AP story of the economic and social impact of an ICE raid in a poultry plant in a small town in southeast Georgia. “This Georgia community of about 1,000 people has become little more than a ghost town since Sept. 1, when federal agents began rounding up illegal immigrants. The sweep has had the unintended effect of underscoring just how vital the illegal immigrants were to the local economy.”
More than 120 illegal immigrants have been loaded onto buses bound for immigration courts in Atlanta, 189 miles away. Hundreds more fled Emanuel County. Residents say many scattered into the woods, camping out for days. They worry some are still hiding without food. Last month, the federal government reported that Georgia had the fastest-growing illegal immigrant population in the country. The number more than doubled from an estimated 220,000 in 2000 to 470,000 last year.
My posting with Pew Hispanic data says that in early 2005 there were about 165,000 illegal immigrant workers in the state. Assuming a 65% workforce rate, 470,000 might be a stretch. OK, and so…
Since the mid-1990s, Stillmore has grown dependent on the paychecks of Mexican workers who originally came for seasonal farm labor, picking the area’s famous Vidalia onions. Many then took year-round jobs at the Crider plant, with a workforce of about 900. Crider President David Purtle said the agents began inspecting the company’s employment records in May. They found 700 suspected illegal immigrants, and supervisors handed out letters over the summer ordering them to prove they came to the U.S. legally or be fired. Only about 100 kept their jobs.
So it was the 100 remaining who were effectively targeted.
The poultry plant has limped along with half its normal workforce. Crider increased its starting wages by $1 an hour to help recruit new workers.
A Marie Antoinette statement on illegal immigrants
The Massaschusetts gubernatorial race between a black Democratic nominee, who won a primary yesterday, and an aide Governor Mitt Romney who made one of the more colorful remarks about illegal immigrants. Lt Governor Kerry Healey, a Republican ,said last year during a radio interview that she opposed proposed legislation to enable children of illegal immigrant families to obtain the in-state tuition benefits for education at the state’s public colleges and universities. She said that they can perfectly well pay themselves for private college education, presumably at colleges such as Wellesley and Amherst. Healey owns homes on the North Shore of Massachusetts, Vermont and Florida. I wonder if her lawns are being manicured by illegal workers.
An analysis of WC law protections for illegal immigrants
This summer, the American Educational Institute published, for people like insurance claims executives and insurance brokers, an analysis of workers comp benefits for illegal aliens. Here it is.
New article: Illegal immigrants frequently denied compensation
A very well documented story was run on 9/15, by Liz Chandler of McClatchy Newspapers. about problems with access to workers comp protections for immigrant workers — in particular illegal workers. This is the best national scope journalistic report to date on this problem, which I have often addressed. she writes:
In one national study, university researchers surveyed 2,660 day laborers, most of them working illegally. One in five said he’d suffered a work injury. Among those who were hurt in the last year, 54 percent said they didn’t receive the medical care they needed, and only 6 percent got workers’ comp benefits. Employers in at least 20 states, arguing that their employees shouldn’t receive injury benefits because they’re illegal immigrants, have fought and lost in courts and review boards. Among those employees were a California laborer who hurt his back lifting sacks of coffee, an Arizona auto mechanic who was hit in the eye by flying debris, a Maryland carpenter who cut his hand on a saw, and a North Carolina construction worker who suffered a brain injury when he fell 30 feet onto a concrete floor.
the article:
Continue reading New article: Illegal immigrants frequently denied compensation
Many immigrants working at WTC cleanup
As reported in Newsday, “experts estimate that [among the 40,000 workers engaged in the cleanup] between 3,000 and 10,000 Ground Zero workers were immigrants, of which half — between 1,500 and 5,000 — were in the country without papers, said Carmen Calderon of the Manhattan-based nonprofit New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health.” Another estimate can be derived from the Sept 2006 Mt. Sinai Medical Center medical study of 9,000 cleanup workers. It reported that 17% of examinations were in languages other than English: 10.3% in Spanish, 3.3% in Polish, 0.3% in other. Per the Mt. Sinai study, 23.8% of those examined had Hispanic ethnicity. So assuming that 20% of the workers were immigrants, Let’s estimate that 75% of Hispanic workers, or 17.8% are immigrants. Adding the Polish speaking we come to about 20% of all workers, or 8,000 workers.
How many were undocumented? 1,500 seems to be too low, and 4,000 – 5,000 conceivable if you assume that 75% of Spanish speakers are undocumented and 75% of Polish speakers are undocumented. I don’t have a way to make a better estimate.
The Newsday article goes on:
Interviews across the region show that some of the undocumented immigrants who worked at the site are, in fact, now seeking treatment offered by Stony Brook, Mount Sinai and other regional facilities.
In February, Calderon’s group opened an office in Hauppauge to search out these workers on Long Island and to offer assistance. Meanwhile, Stony Brook’s monitoring program is planning to hire a Spanish-speaking doctor and social worker to cope with what they expect will be a growing number of undocumented immigrants coming for help at the Islandia clinic.
Experts and activists say that many of the undocumented immigrants have not come forward because of language barriers. Others fear deportation, although government officials say they don’t plan any such crackdowns. Calderon said most of the undocumented immigrants are from Poland, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
Throwaway workers: dangerous jobs take toll on illegal immigrants
Thanks to Jason Barab of Confined Space for alerting me to the publication of this report by Stephen Franklin and Darnell Little of the Chicago Tribune on the occupational injury and death risks of immigrant labor, especially illegal workers. This is not the first not the last news article to be written on this topic. The authors present case studies from around the country. Excerpts:
Over the last decade, Latino workers’ fatality rates have soared, outstripping their share of the workforce. With more Latinos on the job, many suffer a hefty dose of injuries from some of the most dangerous jobs, according to government statistics and interviews with union, workplace safety and public health experts, as well as workers. They are vulnerable because many are immigrants who are illiterate in English, have little understanding of American culture and are grateful for any job, no matter how dangerous. And because many are undocumented immigrants, afraid of being deported, they often don’t ask questions and don’t challenge the boss.”
Since 1997, Latino workers in Illinois have had an injury rate twice that of others, said Dr. Linda Forst at the University of Illinois at Chicago, relying on figures from the Illinois Trauma Registry. Latino workers’ rate of amputations for fingers or hands is three times that of others.
When Antonio Cabrera, a 25-year-old Guatemalan, was badly injured in a Chicago construction accident, he was so petrified he hid instead of getting immediate help. Eager for work and in debt $6,000 to the “coyote” who had smuggled him to Chicago, he took a painting job on the North Side last spring. The pay was about $7 an hour. Back home in rural Guatemala, where his wife and four children still live, he had earned $4 a day as a farmer. It had started to snow, and he was the last of the painters to quit, suspended in a swing three stories aboveground. Usually, his team would use a backup rope for safety, but this time, for some reason, he said there wasn’t one for him.
As he began to lower himself, the rope broke, and Cabrera plummeted to the street, landing first on his left foot. Passersby called police, but his co-workers, hearing the approaching sirens, panicked and hid him in a nearby car. A bone was sticking out of his foot, so they covered it with a blanket. When police arrived, he and his co-workers insisted he was OK and did not need any help. They feared being turned over to immigration officials. “I was afraid, and they were afraid too,” he recalled. Cabrera was lucky because he did go to the hospital, and his medical bills were covered by the painting company’s health insurance. Contacted by the Tribune, the painting company owner would not discuss the incident.
House Republicans to stop beating the immigration reform drum
This, as reported through several media in particular the New York Times, is pleasant to hear, at the very least. I suspect that the decision was made on the basis that House Republicans and Senate Republicans were at odds over immigration reform, and that the get-tough House approach ran counter to the White House’s view.
Mexican remittances at annual rate of $20 billion
From the AP: The Mexicans living abroad sent $11 billion home in the first half of 2006, an increase of 23 percent over the same period last year, the government news agency Notimex reported Friday. Remittances have become an increasingly important source of income for the country in recent years, surpassing tourism. They represent Mexico’s second-largest source of foreign income after oil. They topped $20 billion for the first time in 2005, a 17 percent increase from the previous year.
This is double the rate of $10 billion used in analyzing the commerce of remittances by companies such as Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart further penetrates the banking activities of Mexicans
From the Los Angeles Times comes an article about Wal-Mart’s upcoming creation of a Mexico-domiciled bank. Its initiative may have an important impact on how Mexicans in the United States conduct their financial transactions with their home country. There are several converging stories here. First, improving access to low cost banking in Mexico. Second, broadening of Wal-Mart’s extensive U.S. operations in check cashing and expediting remittances from workers to Mexico. Third, a complement to Wal-Mart’s U.S. plan to open “industrial loan corporations,” or stripped down banks, among its 3,900 domestic stores. All in all, Wal-Mart is becoming the banking intermediary of choice of Mexicans living and working in the U.S.
In a prior posting, I wrote how “the Mexican worker in U.S. remits on average $2000 a year to Mexico. Average individual remittance is $300, with transaction fees of $10 to $20. This is a $3.5 billion business growing to $10 billion. This source estimates that only 25% of Mexican workers have a bank account, which presumably supports its $10 billion forecast.”
Excerpts from the article:
The unit, Wal-Mart de Mexico, confirmed this month that it had applied for a banking license, raising the possibility that Wal-Mart shoppers south of the border soon may be opening checking accounts and taking out auto loans while filling up their grocery carts.
Mexican customers can already get store-branded credit cards that Wal-Mart offers through third-party providers. They can wire money, make deposits, cash checks and perform other transactions thanks to agreements the retailer has made with institutions including BBVA Bancomer and MoneyGram International to operate branches and ATMs inside some stores.
Continue reading Wal-Mart further penetrates the banking activities of Mexicans