"Unemployed immigrants go back to school as their numbers rise"
Escrito por Rakesh Sharma of Medill | 24 febrero 2010
Santiago Mendes moved through a succession of jobs after he was laid off in January last year. The 41-year-old Chicagoan, who had worked as a factory supervisor in a local plant for 15 years, worked brief stints as a busboy, a waiter and at his old supervisor job. “Everywhere, I got the same story,” he said. “No more orders and no more customers.”
Mendes is among the immigrant unemployed. According to the latest figures available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, their numbers surged last year by almost 40 percent.
Based on Bureau figures, the rates for immigrants mirror general unemployment rates. But the U-6 measure, a broader indicator of unemployment that includes part-time workers and the unemployed who have become so discouraged that they're no longer actively seeking work, tells a different story.
According to a report by the Center of Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank, the overall general U-6 measure for immigrants in August 2009 was 19.6 percent, almost 4 percentage points greater than the figure for native-born Americans. Steven Camarota, director of research at the center, said the figures have not changed much since then. “The economy seems to have bottomed out,” he said. “The figures may have gotten a little better, at the most.”
Camarota said the disparity between U-6 measures was, in large part, due to layoffs of immigrants with low skills and education. He said the least educated immigrants – those without a high school diploma – had an unemployment rate of only 5 percent in the booming economy. “They seem to have flipped out during the current recession,” said Camarota.
Layoffs in the manufacturing industry have particularly impacted such immigrants in Chicago.
Huong Dao, employment program manager at the Vietnamese Association of Illinois, said the loss of manufacturing jobs has been difficult for her clients. “Most applicants to our programs come from this industry,” she said. “So, it has been very bad for them.”
Oswaldo Alvarez, coordinator of an education program at Erie Neighborhood Housing, a West Side non-profit that works with immigrants, estimates that 30 percent of applicants for programs at Erie are from the manufacturing sector. In addition, he said other program participants had held low-income jobs from “maintenance kitchens to assembly lines.” To read more, click here.
