Just the Facts

Background:  Immigration is a critical issue for farmworkers.  The majority of farmworkers are undocumented, with estimates ranging from 53% to 75% of the workforce.  Without legal status, most farmworkers are too fearful of deportation to challenge unfair treatment.  Intensified immigration enforcement efforts have driven undocumented workers further underground, leaving them even more vulnerable to exploitation.  Read more...

Published On: Tue, Jan 01, 2008 | Download File

Myth: Foreign low wage workers depress the wages of U.S. workers.
Fact: Immigrants don’t have a negative impact on the majority of native born workers, and often exact a positive impact.

• The primary reason that immigrants don’t have a negative impact on the majority of native-born workers is that they aren’t competing for the same jobs.
• The U.S. population is growing older and better educated, while the U.S. economy continues to create a large number of low skill jobs that favor younger workers with little formal education. As a result, immigrants increasingly are filling jobs at the less-skilled end of the occupational spectrum for which relatively few native-born workers are available.
• Even among workers with the same level of formal education, the foreign-born tend to be employed in different occupations than U.S. natives. Less-educated foreign-born workers, for instance, are found mostly in agricultural and personal service jobs, while less-educated natives are found mostly in manufacturing and mining.
• Immigration raised the average wage of the native-born worker by 1.1 percent during the 1990s. Among native-born workers with a high-school diploma or more education, wages increased between 0.8 percent and 1.5 percent.
• Since workers with different levels of education perform different tasks and fill different roles in production, the majority of native-born workers (those with intermediate educational levels) experience benefits, more than competition, from foreign-born workers concentrated in high and low educational groups.

Published On: Tue, Jan 01, 2008 | Download File

Answers the questions: How many high-skilled immigrant workers are in the U.S.?;

Published On: Tue, Jan 01, 2008 | Download File

The “SAVE Act” was introduced in November 2007 by Reps. Heath Shuler (D-NC) and Brian Bilbray (R-CA).  A companion bill (S. 2368) has been introduced in the Senate by Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA).  The “SAVE Act” is an immigration enforcement-only package that would dramatically expand the error-ridden Basic Pilot electronic employment verification system and make a number of harsh and unnecessary changes to current law .  The Basic Pilot system is currently used by only 30,000 employers, but would expand to cover over 6 million employers in just four years – roughly a 20,000 percent increase.  Beyond that, the bill seeks to increase the Border Patrol and spend more resources on the southern border, codify recently withdrawn DHS regulations related to the Social Security Administration “no match” letters, expand local police responsibilities to include immigration enforcement, and a number of other enforcement measures.  Absent from the bill are any provisions that would address the more than 12 million people in the US without status. 

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Published On: Sat, Dec 15, 2007 | Download File