Report says immigrants working in the US to not take Americans' jobs

August 19 2009 by Mark Johnstone

Working in US requires valid visa

The third installment of the Immigration Policy Center’s ‘Untying the Knot’ report has been released to further clear up inaccuracies about foreign workers taking Americans’ jobs.

This final part of the report, by Bob Paral and Associates, concludes that employed recent immigrants living in the America with US work visas, cannot simply be ‘swapped’ for unemployed US citizens in terms of the jobs they are doing. The report explains that unemployed natives and employed immigrant workers tend to be educated to different levels, have different types of experience and live in different parts of the country.

The previous parts of the report looked at figures from the Census Bureau and demonstrated that there was no relationship between the number of immigrants working in a region and the number of unemployed native-born US citizens in that region.

Mary Giovagnoli, the director of the Immigration Policy Center, says the report helps to clear up some common misconceptions about people moving to the US to work. She says, “The report challenges the assumption that all native-born and immigrant workers are interchangeable or compete for the same jobs and instead shows that immigrant workers who work in the US, more often than not, tend to complement the native-born worker within a particular job market."

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