Why the Racial Employment Gap in New York is not Racism

by Lewis Loflin

In 2000, New York City had 2.9 million foreign-born residents, the largest number in its history. These immigrants have come from a multitude of nations that is unmatched by any other city...The importance of immigration in stabilizing New York City's population is only exceeded by the huge impact it has had on the city's racial and ethnic composition.

With the passage of the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act, the countries from which immigrants originated shifted from southern and eastern Europe to Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean. As a result, New York City experienced a dramatic shift in its racial composition, from a population that was majority European to one where no group comprises a majority...

Latin Americans, in general, had low levels of socioeconomic attainment. But by having multiple workers in their households, Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Mexicans raised their household incomes, increasing the economic viability of their households. While educational attainment and earnings for nonhispanic Caribbean groups were below the city average, they had household incomes that were either close to the city median (Trinidadians, Haitians, and Jamaicans) or above the city median (for the Guyanese), thanks to their higher labor force participation.

(Europeans are the highest earners, Asians are all over the place.)

...Since immigration is heavily tied to kinship networks, a neighborhood that is home to immigrants tends to attract more recent entrants as well, resulting in ethnic enclaves...Immigration has radically reshaped the race/Hispanic composition of the city...

Unemployment among blacks in New York City has increased much faster than for whites, and the gap appears to be widening at an accelerating pace...the number of unemployed blacks in the city rose four times as fast...By the end of March, there were about 80,000 more unemployed blacks than whites, according to the report, even though there are roughly 1.5 million more whites than blacks here...

Economists said they were not certain why so many more blacks were losing their jobs in New York, especially when a large share of the layoffs in the city have been in fields where they are not well represented, like finance and professional services...African-Americans have been hit disproportionately hard...the city’s overall unemployment rate hit a 12-year high of 9 percent in May.

The jobless rate for all blacks in the city rose to 14.7 percent in the first quarter, up from 5.7 percent in the first quarter of 2008. During the same period, the unemployment rate for white New Yorkers rose only moderately, to 3.7 percent from 3 percent...Among Hispanics, the rate rose to 9.3 percent in the first quarter of 2009 from 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2008; among Asians and other ethnic classifications, the rate rose to 7.1 percent from 5.5 percent.

David R. Jones, president and chief executive of the Community Service Society says. "Low-wage workers and workers who lack skills are really getting hit hard. These are the workers who are sort of fungible. They lose their jobs very quickly, particularly in retail, the people who move boxes and do unskilled work. There are large numbers of African-Americans in that sector."

Manufacturing, which has shed more jobs than any other sector of the city’s economy, had become a mainstay for black workers, Mr. Jones said. Government jobs had also become a prime source of solid, stable work for many blacks in the city, he added. But lately there have been cutbacks there, too, as falling tax revenue has forced the paring back of budgets.

James Parrott, the chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute, a liberal research group, pointed out that employment with the Postal Service in the city has declined by about 2,000 jobs, many of which were held by blacks. City officials have been wringing their hands about the mass firings that have occurred in high-paying industries like financial and legal services, consulting and publishing, but those cutbacks account for less than half of the 108,000-job decline since employment in the city peaked in August...

In comparing jobs data for the 12 months through April 30 with the previous one-year period...Mr. Parrott’s analysis painted a stark picture of how uneven the effects have been for whites, blacks and members of other minorities. His figures show that whites gained about 130,000 jobs in the year that ended April 30 over the previous 12 months, but blacks, Hispanics and Asians all lost jobs during that period. Employment fell by about 17,000 jobs for blacks, 26,000 jobs for Hispanics and 18,000 for Asians and other ethnic groups, the data show.

It's Illegal Aliens, Not White Racism

"New York City is home to more than 3 million immigrants, and a half-million of them came to this country illegally. Although they broke the law by illegally crossing our borders ... our city's economy would be a shell of itself had they not, and it would collapse if they were deported. The same holds true for the nation."

The United States is simply hooked on cheap, illegal workers and deferring the costs of providing public services to these quasi-Americans. Illegal immigration has been America’s way of competing with the low-wage forces of Asia and Latin America, and deserves more credit for the steroid-enhanced effect it has had on productivity, low inflation, housing starts, and retail sales.

Employers also have incentive to hire undocumented workers off the books, taking advantages of inefficient immigration enforcement. The competitive winds of deflation from overseas labor markets have forced U.S. employers to find extra-legal, innovative ways to capitalize on sources of cheaper labor to stay competitive. These employers have, in turn, placed pressure on the government to ignore the flood of cheap labor...

The overall effects of new immigrant inflows from 2000 to 2005 on American labor markets are unprecedented. Between 2000 and 2005, the total number of employed workers 16 and older in the nation increased by 4.8 million. Over the same time period, the number of new immigrants entering the nation and finding work was estimated to be 4.13 million. This means that new immigrants accounted for 86 percent of the total gain in employment that the nation experienced over the past five years. Our analysis suggests that close to two-thirds of these new immigrant arrivals were unauthorized. Among males, all of the net growth in employment between 2000 and 2005 was attributable to new immigrants...

Worse still, the impact of this displacement of native-born workers and established immigrants was concentrated among young people. The total number of native-born people ages 16 to 34 has increased over the past five years, while the number of these young people who reported being employed has fallen by 4.2 million. At the same time, the number of new immigrants ages 16 to 34 who found work between 2000 and 2005 increased by 2.7 million.

Available evidence shows that there has been a high rate of displacement of younger, native-born male workers and younger women without four-year college degrees by newer immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants ... Illegal immigration has also contributed to the growth of off-the-books jobs and the breakdown of American labor laws. Over the past five years, only one of every five additional workers in private-sector jobs in the United States has ended up on the formal payrolls of national private-sector employers, where payroll and income taxes are withheld and workers are protected by laws regarding workers' safety, health, and wages...

Extra: How to Win

• Blogging sites (this one) in the news
• Illegal Aliens in East Tennessee
• Responses to Ed Barlow of Creating the Future
• Study Says White Families' Wealth Advantage Has Grown

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