Migrants Becoming Skilled Workers

College-educated immigrants rising in number, report says

by Daniel González - Jun. 10, 2011 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic LINK

College-educated immigrants now exceed the share of immigrants without high-school diplomas, marking a significant shift in the education level of the nation's immigrant population, a new report shows.

The findings show that the skill level of the nation's immigrant population is more varied and counters perceptions often depicted in the debate over immigration, which has focused mostly on low-skilled illegal immigrants.

"We've had a lot of discussions - and this goes triple for Arizona - about controlling immigration, managing the border better, taking care of enforcement issues. And we've been so focused on that, we haven't really acknowledged that we have a lot of different immigrants in this country," said Audrey Singer, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and a co-author of the report. "They come from all different kinds of backgrounds, they have all different kinds of education levels, and, in fact, we now have more who have a college degree than don't have a high-school diploma."

The report, released Thursday, examined the education levels of immigrants in 100 metropolitan regions, including the Phoenix area. The report was written by Singer, a senior fellow at Brookings, a non-profit, nonpartisan think tank; Matthew Hall, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago; and Gordon De Jong and Deborah Roempke Graefe, population researchers at Pennsylvania State University.

Nationally, 44 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas have immigrant populations where high-skilled immigrants significantly outnumber low-skilled immigrants, the report found. Phoenix was not among the 44.

Overall, 30 percent of working-age immigrants nationally ages 25 to 64 had at least a college degree compared with 28 percent without a high-school diploma. In comparison, in 1980, 19 percent of working-age immigrants had a college degree compared with 40 percent who hadn't completed high school, the report said.

"The ratio of the two has been converging over the past 15 years," Singer said. "It's not like we are getting fewer low-skilled. But as a proportion of the total, it's dropping."

The share of highly skilled immigrants has been growing because of an influx of college-educated immigrants and a growing number of immigrants in the U.S. who attained college degrees while here, she said.

The report was based on data from the Census Bureau's 2009 American Community Survey and the 2010 census.

About 15.4 percent of the 4.3 million residents in the Phoenix area were immigrants as of 2009, the report said. The report did not distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants.

The report found that the Valley has far more low-skilled immigrants, 225,558, than high-skilled immigrants, 105,230. Put another way, for every 100 low-skilled immigrants, the Valley has 47 high-skilled immigrants, according to the report.

Most large cities in the Southwest received low rankings, meaning low-skilled immigrants outnumbered high-skilled immigrants. The Tucson area, like the Valley, received a low ranking. For every 100 low-skilled immigrants, there are 58 high-skilled immigrants in the Tucson area.

Of the five metro areas classified as "emerging gateways" - cities with fast-growing immigrant populations that had not experienced large amounts of immigration in the past - the Valley ranked lowest in the ratio of low-skilled immigrants to high-skilled immigrants. Atlanta, Orlando, Austin and Las Vegas, ranked higher.

Atlanta and Orlando had equal shares of high-skilled and low-skilled immigrants, while Austin and Las Vegas had more low-skilled immigrants than high-skilled.

The Phoenix area has more low-skilled immigrants because it is close to the border with Mexico and because the area's economy has been heavily dependent on construction and tourism and other industries that tend to draw low-skilled immigrants, said Tom Rex, who studies the Arizona economy for Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business.

"Economically, Arizona has many jobs - a disproportionate share relative to the national average - suitable to the less well-educated immigrants in construction, tourism, etc.," he said.

Many low-skilled immigrants are undocumented immigrants from Mexico. In contrast, many of the highly educated immigrants enter on H1-B visas and work for high-tech firms. H1-B visas allow employers to hire workers with special skills from other countries.

"While Arizona has large electronics and aerospace industries, the breadth of its high tech is limited, and much of the high tech in Arizona consists of production facilities, while many of the highly educated immigrants work in R&D (research and development) facilities in other states," Rex said.

Singer said the skill level of Valley immigrants in the future will depend largely on the area's industry.

Cities with higher shares of educated immigrants tend to have more diverse economies that include thriving medical, high-tech and other industries that attract highly educated immigrants, she said.

Border Towns Actually Safe

Friday, Jul. 30, 2010

The 'Dangerous' Border: Actually One of America's Safest Places

By Tim Padgett

When U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled on Wednesday that key provisions of Arizona's new anti-immigration law were unconstitutional, she could have also declared them unnecessary. That is, if the main impetus behind the controversial legislation was, as Arizona Governor Jan Brewer said when she signed it in April, "border-related violence and crime due to illegal immigration." The fact is, despite the murderous mayhem raging across the border in Mexico, the U.S. side, from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, is one of the nation's safest corridors.

According to the FBI, the four large U.S. cities (with populations of at least 500,000) with the lowest violent crime rates — San Diego, Phoenix and the Texas cities of El Paso and Austin — are all in border states. "The border is safer now than it's ever been," U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling told the Associated Press last month. Even Larry Dever, the sheriff of Arizona's Cochise County, where the murder last March of a local rancher, believed to have been committed by an illegal immigrant, sparked calls for the law, conceded to the Arizona Republic recently that "we're not seeing the [violent crime] that's going on on the other side."

Consider Arizona itself — whose illegal-immigrant population is believed to be second only to California's. The state's overall crime rate dropped 12% last year; between 2004 and 2008 it plunged 23%. In the metro area of its largest city, Phoenix, violent crime — encompassing murder, rape, assault and robbery — fell by a third during the past decade and by 17% last year. The border city of Nogales, an area rife with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, hasn't logged a single murder in the past two years.

It is true that Phoenix has in recent years seen a spate of kidnappings. But in almost every case they've involved drug traffickers targeting other narcos for payment shakedowns, and the 318 abductions reported last year were actually down 11% from 2008. Either way, the figure hardly makes Phoenix, as Arizona Senator John McCain claimed last month, "the No. 2 kidnapping capital of the world" behind Mexico City. A number of Latin American capitals can claim that dubious distinction.

An even more telling example is El Paso. Its cross-border Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juárez, suffered almost 2,700 murders last year, most of them drug-related, making it possibly the world's most violent town. But El Paso, a stone's throw across the Rio Grande, had just one murder. A big reason, say U.S. law-enforcement officials, is that the Mexican drug cartels' bloody turf wars generally end at the border and don't follow the drugs into the U.S. Another, says El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles, is that "the Mexican cartels know that if they try to commit that kind of violence here, they'll get shut down."

Which points to perhaps the most important factor: the U.S. has real cops — not criminals posing as cops, as is so often the case in Mexico — policing the border's cities and states. Americans and Mexicans may call their border region "seamless" when it comes to commerce and culture, but that brotherly ideal doesn't apply to law enforcement. That's especially true since state and local police are backed along the border by the thousands of federal agents deployed there. Thus the tough Arizona law — which seeks to allow local and state police to check a person's immigration status, a provision that Judge Bolton agreed opened the door to racial profiling by officers, and requires immigrants to carry their documents at all times — was sparked by largely unfounded fears.

Arizona law-enforcement officials say they believe the Cochise County rancher, Robert Krentz, was killed by an illegal immigrant — perhaps a coyote, or migrant smuggler — or a drug trafficker. His last radio transmission home as he inspected his property indicated he was helping a struggling person he believed to be one of the migrants who regularly trespass private land while crossing into the U.S. But while such assaults are hardly unheard of along the border — and while it's hardly irrational to worry about Mexico's violence eventually spilling into the U.S. — they have hardly risen to a level that justified the draconian Arizona bill. (In fact, if an illegal immigrant did murder Krentz, it would be the first time in more than a decade that a migrant has killed an American along the border's Tucson, Ariz., sector.)

"There's a real disconnect between emotions and facts when it comes to the border," says El Paso city councilman Beto O'Rourke. "You've got a lot of politicians exploiting this fear that the Mexicans are coming over to kill us."

The Arizona law, which Judge Bolton also said infringed on federal jurisdiction, may be a product of border bluster. But it has more than succeeded in getting Washington's attention. Even though the Obama Administration was one of the plaintiffs in the suit against the law, the President is sending 1,200 more National Guard troops to the region this weekend. What's more, our broken immigration system — and the federal government's feckless failure to address it — is a front-burner issue again.

The nation's border is actually a safe place. The nation's debate about it, at least politically, is anything but.

Undocumented Workers Paying Billions into Social Programs

April 5, 2005 Illegal Immigrants Are Bolstering Social Security With Billions By EDUARDO PORTER TOCKTON, Calif. - Since illegally crossing the Mexican border into the United States six years ago, Ángel Martínez has done backbreaking work, harvesting asparagus, pruning grapevines and picking the ripe fruit. More recently, he has also washed trucks, often working as much as 70 hours a week, earning $8.50 to $12.75 an hour. Not surprisingly, Mr. Martínez, 28, has not given much thought to Social Security's long-term financial problems. But Mr. Martínez - who comes from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico and hiked for two days through the desert to enter the United States near Tecate, some 20 miles east of Tijuana - contributes more than most Americans to the solvency of the nation's public retirement system. Last year, Mr. Martínez paid about $2,000 toward Social Security and $450 for Medicare through payroll taxes withheld from his wages. Yet unlike most Americans, who will receive some form of a public pension in retirement and will be eligible for Medicare as soon as they turn 65, Mr. Martínez is not entitled to benefits. He belongs to a big club. As the debate over Social Security heats up, the estimated seven million or so illegal immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a subsidy of as much as $7 billion a year. While it has been evident for years that illegal immigrants pay a variety of taxes, the extent of their contributions to Social Security is striking: the money added up to about 10 percent of last year's surplus - the difference between what the system currently receives in payroll taxes and what it doles out in pension benefits. Moreover, the money paid by illegal workers and their employers is factored into all the Social Security Administration's projections. Illegal immigration, Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, co-director of immigration studies at New York University, noted sardonically, could provide "the fastest way to shore up the long-term finances of Social Security." It is impossible to know exactly how many illegal immigrant workers pay taxes. But according to specialists, most of them do. Since 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act set penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, most such workers have been forced to buy fake ID's to get a job. Currently available for about $150 on street corners in just about any immigrant neighborhood in California, a typical fake ID package includes a green card and a Social Security card. It provides cover for employers, who, if asked, can plausibly assert that they believe all their workers are legal. It also means that workers must be paid by the book - with payroll tax deductions. IRCA, as the immigration act is known, did little to deter employers from hiring illegal immigrants or to discourage them from working. But for Social Security's finances, it was a great piece of legislation. Starting in the late 1980's, the Social Security Administration received a flood of W-2 earnings reports with incorrect - sometimes simply fictitious - Social Security numbers. It stashed them in what it calls the "earnings suspense file" in the hope that someday it would figure out whom they belonged to. The file has been mushrooming ever since: $189 billion worth of wages ended up recorded in the suspense file over the 1990's, two and a half times the amount of the 1980's. In the current decade, the file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year, generating $6 billion to $7 billion in Social Security tax revenue and about $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes. In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social Security Administration, nine million W-2's with incorrect Social Security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages. Social Security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. But they suspect that the portion is significant. "Our assumption is that about three-quarters of other-than-legal immigrants pay payroll taxes," said Stephen C. Goss, Social Security's chief actuary, using the agency's term for illegal immigration. Other researchers say illegal immigrants are the main contributors to the suspense file. "Illegal immigrants account for the vast majority of the suspense file," said Nick Theodore, the director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "Especially its growth over the 1990's, as more and more undocumented immigrants entered the work force." Using data from the Census Bureau's current population survey, Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an advocacy group in Washington that favors more limits on immigration, estimated that 3.8 million households headed by illegal immigrants generated $6.4 billion in Social Security taxes in 2002. A comparative handful of former illegal immigrant workers who have obtained legal residence have been able to accredit their previous earnings to their new legal Social Security numbers. Mr. Camarota is among those opposed to granting a broad amnesty to illegal immigrants, arguing that, among other things, they might claim Social Security benefits and put further financial stress on the system. The mismatched W-2's fit like a glove on illegal immigrants' known geographic distribution and the patchwork of jobs they typically hold. An audit found that more than half of the 100 employers filing the most earnings reports with false Social Security numbers from 1997 through 2001 came from just three states: California, Texas and Illinois. According to an analysis by the Government Accountability Office, about 17 percent of the businesses with inaccurate W-2's were restaurants, 10 percent were construction companies and 7 percent were farm operations. Most immigration helps Social Security's finances, because new immigrants tend to be of working age and contribute more than they take from the system. A simulation by Social Security's actuaries found that if net immigration ran at 1.3 million a year instead of the 900,000 in their central assumption, the system's 75-year funding gap would narrow to 1.67 percent of total payroll, from 1.92 percent - savings that come out to half a trillion dollars, valued in today's money. Illegal immigrants help even more because they will never collect benefits. According to Mr. Goss, without the flow of payroll taxes from wages in the suspense file, the system's long-term funding hole over 75 years would be 10 percent deeper. Yet to immigrants, the lack of retirement benefits is just part of the package of hardship they took on when they decided to make the trek north. Tying vines in a vineyard some 30 miles north of Stockton, Florencio Tapia, 20, from Guerrero, along Mexico's Pacific coast, has no idea what the money being withheld from his paycheck is for. "I haven't asked," Mr. Tapia said. For illegal immigrants, Social Security numbers are simply a tool needed to work on this side of the border. Retirement does not enter the picture. "There will be a moment when I won't be able to continue working," Mr. Martínez acknowledges. "But that's many years off." Mario Avalos, a naturalized Nicaraguan immigrant who prepares income tax returns for many workers in the area, including immigrants without legal papers, observes that many older workers return home to Mexico. "Among my clients," he said, "I can't recall anybody over 60 without papers." No doubt most illegal immigrants would prefer to avoid Social Security altogether. As part of its efforts to properly assign the growing pile of unassigned wages, Social Security sends about 130,000 letters a year to employers with large numbers of mismatched pay statements. Though not an intended consequence of these so-called no-match letters, in many cases employers who get them dismiss the workers affected. Or the workers - fearing that immigration authorities might be on their trail - just leave. Last February, for instance, discrepancies in Social Security numbers put an end to the job of Minerva Ortega, 25, from Zacatecas, in northern Mexico, who worked in the cheese department at a warehouse for Mike Campbell & Associates, a distributor for Trader Joe's, a popular discount food retailer with a large operation in California. The company asked dozens of workers to prove that they had cleared up or were in the process of clearing up the "discrepancy between the information on our payroll related to your employment and the S.S.A.'s records." Most could not. Ms. Ortega said about 150 workers lost their jobs. In a statement, Mike Campbell said that it did not fire any of the workers, but Robert Camarena, a company official, acknowledged that many left. Ms. Ortega is now looking for work again. She does not want to go back to the fields, so she is holding out for a better-paid factory job. Whatever work she finds, though, she intends to go on the payroll with the same Social Security number she has now, a number that will not jibe with federal records. With this number, she will continue paying taxes. Last year she paid about $1,200 in Social Security taxes, matched by her employer, on an income of $19,000. She will never see the money again, she realizes, but at least she will have a job in the United States. "I don't pay much attention," Ms. Ortega said. "I know I don't get any benefit." Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top

Utah's Compact

Utah's 1070 opponents (unlike here) are not wimps

EJ Montini

Arizona Republic

Thursday, November 18, 2010

LINK

Are people in Utah actually tougher than people in Arizona?

Are people in Utah actually more open-minded than people in Arizona?

Are people in Utah actually more willing to take a stand than people in Arizona?

Am I actually about to say that the answer to each of these questions is “Yes?”

Actually, yes.

As is happening in a lot of states, legislators in Utah have proposed a version of SB 1070. Unlike a lot of states – particularly ours – a collective of mainstream politicians , business people and religious leaders have come forward to oppose them. We're talking about the type of people who can't be written off as open-border advocates, kooks or malcontents.

The type of people who aren't intimidated by political blowhards and who don't cower in the face of publicity stunts from the local sheriff.

Just last week the group put their names to a document they call “The Utah Compact.”

Essentially, it calls for finding a way to deal with the illegal immigration problem that does not simply involve rounding people up and shipping them out.

The document says, “Immigrants are integrated into communities across Utah. We must adopt a humane approach to this reality, reflecting our unique culture, history and spirit of inclusion. The way we treat immigrants wills ay more about us as a free society and less about our immigrant neighbors. Utah should always be a place that welcomes people of goodwill.”

One of those who signed the compact, Utah's Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, said, “We are different from Arizona. We do things differently here. We want to show people we can do something about this issue in a compassionate and lawful way.”

The idea of having a discussion about illegal immigration that doesn't involve shouting or insults got started several years ago when a conservative think tank in Salt Lake City, the Sutherland Institute, published a paper that began, “We confidently recommend that Utah public policy should seek to fully assimilate otherwise law-abiding immigrants already residing here.”

Last summer I spoke with Paul Mero, president of the Sutherland Institute. Among the ides being discussed was that Utah issue its own work permits for those in the state illegally but who have not committed any other crime. If the federal government were to allow such a thing in Utah it could serve as a test case and counter point to Arizona.

I spoke with Mero again this week.

“I heard that there were 17 different immigration bill filings (in Utah),” he said. “But my guess is that with the Utah Compact group you will see one alternative to the Arizona-style bill.”

Mero didn't say exactly what would be included in the alternative bill. Those details have yet to be released.

But he did say this, “I think in Utah there is a critical mass of community leaders who are willing to face reality. That reality is that we have undocumented immigrants living in Utah, and we are willing to step back and be reasonable. That is, not follow Arizona into a police state, enforcement only approach.

“We can agree that the feds screwed up and the states are left holding the bag. But what we do about it can be different. … Our ultimate response really does say more about us as a people than it does about undocumented immigrants.”

Mero and others have been working since June on alternative legislation to an SB 1070 bill. When introduced in Utah something will happen there that never occurred here. And hasn't still. "It's going to create such a wonderful public debate," Mero said.