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EuroWire – November 2007
39
Against the trend, Hispanic immigrants
to the US boost their earnings
If the income of the average American is shrinking, one group
is conspicuously bucking the trend. According to another
study centred on the year 2005 and released 21
st
August by the
Pew Hispanic Center, over the past decade Latino immigrants
in the US have steadily moved out
of jobs paying the lowest wages and
into middle-income employment. (The
Pew Hispanic Center is a non-partisan
research organisation founded in 2001
to improve understanding of the US
Hispanic population and to chronicle
the growing impact of Latinos on the
nation.) According to a Pew analysis
of US Census data, foreign-born Latino
workers made up 36% of labourers
earning low wages (less than $8.50 per
hour) in 2005, compared with 42% in
1995. The advance of Latino immigrant
wage-earners to the middle-income level
– outpacing that of native-born workers
– is largely attributable to the boom in
the nation’s construction industry, which
hires millions of foreign-born workers but
which has slowed down of late.
The Pew profile of foreign-born Latinos
– who make up 5.8% of the population of
the US but account for 7.2% of its workers
– suggests a motivated population with a
strong work ethic. Pew notes that Latino
immigrants who arrived in the past few
years are older, better educated, and less
likely to be employed in low-paying jobs
than earlier arrivals. Some immigrants
boosted their incomes by opening
businesses, enabling them to move
quickly from the low-paying service
sector into wealthy entrepreneurship.
US emigration to Canada
reaches a 30-year high
Over the past five years there has been a
significant increase in the number of US
citizens moving north to Canada, and last
year it hit 10,942, compared with 9,262
in 2005 and 5,828 in 2000. According to
the Association for Canadian Studies,
this represents a 20% increase over 2005
and is almost double the total for 2000.
“The number hasn’t exceeded 10,000
since 1977,” said Jack Jedwab, the
association’s executive director. Earlier in
that decade, Canada admitted between
22,000 and 26,000 Americans a year, most
of them evading military draft during
the Vietnam War. Now, the American
armed services are all-volunteer.
But from the anecdotal evidence Mr Jedwab ascribes the current
increase in US emigration to Canada largely to similar, if less
urgent, social and political motivations.
“They’re coming because many of them don’t like the politics,
the Iraq War, and the security situation in the US,” he told
ABC
News
(31
st
July). “By comparison, Canada is a tension-free place.
People feel safer.”