A testament to the character and depth of the current recessiontriggered by the housing slump.
A year ago, a day-laborer center adjacent to a Home Depot here teemed with Latin American immigrants who showed up and found a sure day’s work painting, gardening or hauling.
Thesedays, more than immigrants are packing the Hollywood Community JobCenter: Unemployed Americans are joining them. There’s little work foranybody.
“Everybody is coming to look forwork,” Rene Jemio, outreach coordinator for the hiring hall, told theWall Street Journal. “It’s not just your average immigrant anymore;it’s African-Americans and whites, too.” (He means European-Americans. — Ed.)
Forthe first time in a decade, unskilled immigrants are competing withAmericans for work. And evidence is emerging that tens of thousands ofHispanic immigrants are withdrawing from the labor market as U.S.workers crowd them out of potential jobs. At least some of theforeigners are returning home.
“We see competition from more nonimmigrantworkers,” says Abel Valenzuela, a professor at the University ofCalifornia at Los Angeles who studies day laborers. “Employers are alsopaying less than in previous years,” he says.
Inthe third quarter of 2008, 71.3 percent of Latino immigrant workerswere either employed or actively seeking work, compared with 72.4percent in the same quarter a year earlier, according to a new study bythe Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization. The1.1-percentage-point drop “marks a substantial decrease in thelabor-market participation of Latino immigrants,” says Rakesh Kochhar,the Pew economist who prepared the report.
Since2003, the labor force participation rate — the employed or job-seekingshare of the population — among foreign-born Hispanics had beenconsistently on the rise. The decline in the third quarter of 2008 “isa testament to the character and depth of the current recessiontriggered by the housing slump,” says the Pew report.