Immigrants Hit Milestone in U.S.

WASHINGTON (Dec. 7) -- If you think immigrants have taken lots of American jobs, you may be right. If you think they're all uneducated farm workers and gardeners, you are definitely wrong.

A new report by the Census Bureau shows nearly one in six U.S. workers was born outside the country, the highest percentage in 50 years. There are more foreign-born workers than ever, with 23.9 million listing a non-U.S. birthplace in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available.

As a proportion of the workforce, immigrants still don't hold as many jobs as they did a century ago. In 1910, during a wave of Eastern European immigration, more than one in five jobs, or 20.5 percent, were held by foreign-born workers.

Changes in immigration policy in the 1920s slammed the door on most new arrivals. By 1970, the percentage of foreign-born workers bottomed out at 5.2 percent. It's been trending up ever since thanks to a new wave of legal immigrants and a surge in undocumented ones.

Now, as the Obama administration prepares early next year to open a new debate on immigration reforms that would include a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants, the Census statistics provide likely fodder for advocates on both sides of the hot-button issue.

The numbers in the latest American Community Survey break out the foreign-born by whether they have become citizens but do not say anything about the legal status of those who are not. The Census isn't allowed to ask. Still, the findings do belie stereotypes, said Elizabeth Grieco, chief of immigration statistics at Census.

"Many people think that the foreign-born are only low-skilled workers. This isn't true; the foreign-born labor force contributes both highly skilled and low-skilled workers to the economy," she said.

While the foreign-born make up 16 percent of the total civilian labor force, 28 percent of workers with doctoral degrees were born outside the U.S. Among workers with professional and master's degrees, 17 percent and 16 percent, respectively, were foreign-born. Among them: Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google.

But non-natives undeniably cluster at the bottom of the workforce pool as well. Among low-skilled workers, the foreign-born made up 36 percent of the labor force with less than a high school diploma.

Asians remain the brainiest immigrant group. They made up a quarter of the foreign-born workforce but 55 percent of those immigrants with doctoral degrees. Europeans accounted for 11 percent of non-native workers but about another quarter of those with doctorates.

California continued to have the most international workforce, with more than one in three workers born in another country. New York, New Jersey and Nevada were next with at least 25 percent of foreign-born workers.

The states with the fewest non-native workers: Montana, West Virginia and South Dakota.

"This gives us a glimpse of where we're going in the 21st century," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. "If anything, it understates the future implications ... because their children are going to be a big part of the labor force" as baby boomers retire and the recession eases.

Ira Mehlman of the anti-immigration group FAIR said that the 2007 figures depict a labor force "at the peak of the bubble before the bubble burst" last year and don't take into account the millions of jobs lost in the current economic downturn. He said that foreign-born workers at both ends of the educational spectrum hurt Americans by driving down wages at the bottom and squeezing out native-born engineers and other high-tech workers at the top.

Frey rejected that argument. Even in the current down economy, he said, "were it not for immigration, the labor force would be shrinking. We need immigrants to help bolster our labor force."