EoW November 2007

Against the trend, Hispanic immigrants to the US boost their earnings

But from the anecdotal evidence Mr Jedwab ascribes the current increase in US emigration to Canada largely to similar, if less urgent, social and political motivations. “They’re coming because many of them don’t like the politics, the Iraq War, and the security situation in the US,” he told ABC News (31 st July). “By comparison, Canada is a tension-free place. People feel safer.”

If the income of the average American is shrinking, one group is conspicuously bucking the trend. According to another study centred on the year 2005 and released 21 st August by the Pew Hispanic Center, over the past decade Latino immigrants

in the US have steadily moved out of jobs paying the lowest wages and into middle-income employment. (The Pew Hispanic Center is a non-partisan research organisation founded in 2001 to improve understanding of the US Hispanic population and to chronicle the growing impact of Latinos on the nation.) According to a Pew analysis of US Census data, foreign-born Latino workers made up 36% of labourers earning low wages (less than $8.50 per hour) in 2005, compared with 42% in 1995. The advance of Latino immigrant wage-earners to the middle-income level – outpacing that of native-born workers – is largely attributable to the boom in the nation’s construction industry, which hires millions of foreign-born workers but which has slowed down of late. The Pew profile of foreign-born Latinos – who make up 5.8% of the population of the US but account for 7.2% of its workers – suggests a motivated population with a strong work ethic. Pew notes that Latino immigrants who arrived in the past few years are older, better educated, and less likely to be employed in low-paying jobs than earlier arrivals. Some immigrants boosted their incomes by opening businesses, enabling them to move quickly from the low-paying service sector into wealthy entrepreneurship. Over the past five years there has been a significant increase in the number of US citizens moving north to Canada, and last year it hit 10,942, compared with 9,262 in 2005 and 5,828 in 2000. According to the Association for Canadian Studies, this represents a 20% increase over 2005 and is almost double the total for 2000. “The number hasn’t exceeded 10,000 since 1977,” said Jack Jedwab, the association’s executive director. Earlier in that decade, Canada admitted between 22,000 and 26,000 Americans a year, most of them evading military draft during the Vietnam War. Now, the American armed services are all-volunteer. US emigration to Canada reaches a 30-year high

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EuroWire – November 2007