Although the U.S. unemployment rate has risen to over 9 percent, American-born workers are often unwilling to take on low-paying jobs such as restaurant work, receptionist duties, and farm labor. As a result, new immigrants have no shortage of work in the dim economy. However, this development may be bad news for immigrants' long-term social mobility.
Cortes, a Peruvian immigrant, is so busy he barely has time to sleep, busing tables and washing dishes during the evenings at a Manhattan nightclub and doing delivery work for a restaurant in the Bronx during the daytime. He isn't worried about job security – he's just worried about sleep deprivation, which leaves him groggy during the day.
A 20-year old immigrant named Guzman does agricultural work in the Hudson River Valley, picking beans and cherries in the summer and apples in the fall. Unemployment is not a danger for him either.
It's no news that American-born workers are unwilling to stoop to jobs like these. Even with today's spiraling unemployment rate, there has been no significant change in the market for manual labor.
Livia, a student at SUNY Albany, has worked a variety of jobs including tailoring, construction work, golf course maintenance, and a job at McDonald's, but she has never considered agricultural work, since she does not like the idea of getting her whole body grimy.
The situation is similar in the restaurant industry. A manager at the Manhattan restaurant Café du Soleil says that he has never received an application for any low-paying position from an American-born citizen. A 36-year old Gambian immigrant who has done restaurant work for eight years says that during that time he has occasionally had American coworkers, but none of them stayed on longer than six months.
With the exception of American teenagers, immigrants overwhelmingly dominate the food service sector, according to researchers at the American Immigration Law Foundation. American-born workers usually take these kinds of jobs only while they are still in school; to remain doing restaurant work into one's thirties or forties would be seen as a stigma.
The most obvious sign that work opportunities for immigrants remain plentiful is that the number of applicants for H2A "temporary work" permits has not decreased the Associated Press reports. From October 1 of last year to June of this year, a total of 5,574 people applied – an increase from last year's count.
A farm owner in the upstate New York town of Kinderhook said that before accepting applications from immigrant labors, he made a point of posting ads in local papers in order to offer work opportunities to "Americans first." However, nobody replied. The hourly wage at his farm is $9.25, higher than the state-mandated minimum of $7.25 an hour.
Though opportunities appear to abound for immigrants willing to work low-paying jobs, as soon as they aspire to higher-paying positions, such as truck driver, certified nursing assistant, nanny, or data entry worker, they now meet much stiffer competition. Because of the economy, more and more Americans are applying for these jobs.
This trend could arrest new immigrants' climb up the social ladder, however, notes Miguel Carranza, professor of sociology and ethnic studies at University of Nebraska- Lincoln. If immigrants are unable to climb in social status and to increase their earning power, a negative impact could be felt in the next generation, as parents are unable to pay for school, move to a new home, or improve the quality of their living environment. A 48-year old Bengali immigrant reported that after a long time doing low-wage restaurant work he was still unable to get a job as a waiter, since those higher-paying positions were already filled by Americans. He is capable of working as a waiter, he said, but he has just not been given the opportunity.
A farm owner in the suburbs of Buffalo, NY, confirmed this trend. In the past, he says, his laborers would leave as soon as they found better work, but now many of them come back because those new jobs have all been snapped up by others.
