Black Foreign-Born Workers Have Highest Jobless Rate

Original post by James Parks for AFL-CIO Blog

A new study dispels the myth that immigrant workers are taking good-paying jobs away from American-born workers. According to “The Low Wages of Black Immigrants,” released last week by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), black workers, whether they were born in the United States or in a foreign country, have the highest unemployment rate, period.

In the United States, the black unemployment rate in July was 15.9 percent, compared with an overall rate of 9.1 percent. The 12.4 percent jobless rate among black immigrant workers last year was slightly higher than for Hispanic immigrants (11.3 percent) and significantly higher than for white (7.4 percent) and Asian immigrants (7.3 percent).

At the same time, black workers, whether native-born or immigrant, earn significantly less than white workers, the report shows. This is especially true for men. U.S.-born black men earn 19.1 percent less than white men while black immigrant men from English-speaking Caribbean countries earn 20.7 percent less. Haitian men (33.8 percent less) and African men (34.7 percent less) do substantially worse than any other group.

All groups of black women have lower weekly wages than similar U.S.-born white women, but the size of the wage gaps is smaller for women than it is for men.

The report’s co-authors, Patrick Mason, economics professor at Florida State University, and Algernon Austin, director of EPI’s Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program, point out that it’s not a matter of education that cretaes the job and wage gap for blacks. In 2008, more than one-third of African immigrants (36.6 percent) had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 29.5 percent of whites. A higher percentage of native-born blacks (32 percent) had high school education than whites (30 percent), according to the study.

The EPI study follows a U.S. Labor Department report released last month that shows African Americans lag behind the rest of the nation in the slow economic recovery. Other studies show that blacks are disproportionately hurt by cuts in public employment and attacks on public workers.

Mason and Austin said their study makes it clear that:

because this disadvantage in the labor market affects both U.S.- and foreign-born blacks, it points to a problem that stems from race and not cultural background.

Read the full report, “The Low Wages of Black Immigrants,” here.

Pan African Women's Action Summit

The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and our sister organization, Priority Action Network (PAN) will be co-hosting a workshop at the Pan African Women's Action Summit on August 11th, 2011 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Pan-African Women’s Action Summit (PAWAS) was created in 2005 to convene diverse black diaspora women to promote collaboration, networking, skill building, as well as personal health and wellness to strengthen the Pan-African Philanthropy Movement's capacity to impact the social and other issues that affect our communities.

Our workshop is entitled Beyond Us and Them: Sharing Our Stories, Healing Our Communities. Here's the workshop description:

It is a fact that the “black community” in this country is changing and is a lot more diverse than we assume. While the majority of the Black population is still African Americans – there are significant and increasing populations of Black immigrants that are adding challenging existing assumptions of the homogeneity in the “black.”

When then Senator Obama first announced his candidacy for the highest Presidency, much of the discussion among Black communities was the challenge in defining his identity. Clearly he is black and yet he is not of slave-ancestry; he was not “black enough” for some and too black for others. His identity as a man whose father is African, married to an African American made visible the profound need for race dialogue among diverse black communities. It also made visible both the commonalities and differences in the black community.

Statistics show that an estimated 5% of the Black population is made up of immigrants from Africa and another 12% of immigrants from the Caribbean. Yet, racial discourse is framed always within the black/white dichotomy and very little exists to have transnational conversations which bring race, culture, identity and history into our communities.

We at Priority Africa Network and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration have held several community dialogues that brought together diverse groups from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean in the San Francisco/Bay Area. Lessons learned from these over the past five years have given insight into ways to bring much needed exchanges on the critical need to know one another’s history, to go beyond the assumptions of damaging stereotypes held on all sides.

This workshop will present one model on how to hold open and healing exchanges about the divisions that exist in the African diaspora community. As the number of Black immigrants increases in the coming decade, and there is increased visibility of the diversity of Black communities, the opportunity to learn and use these transformative ideas is critical. It will also highlight the role and power of diverse black women, and their allies, in building community across ethnic and racial lines.