Immigrants top native born in U.S. job hunt

A recent CNN report drawn a conclusion similar to what myvisajobs.com made half a year ago: 2010 will become the best year for foreigners to get H1B Visa jobs! 

According to the 2009 American Community Survey (ACS), there were 38.5 million foreign-born residents, representing 12.5 percent of the total population. This has has been increated from 9.6 million or 4.7 percent in 1970, to 14.1 million or 6.2 percent in 1980, 19.8 million or 7.9 percent in 1990, and 31.1 million or 11.1 percent in 2000. As of 2009,  53 percent of all foreign born were from Latin America, 28 percent were from Asia, 13 percent from Europe, 4 percent from Africa, 3 percent from other regions, including Oceania and Northern America.

CNN reported on Oct 29,2010 that, immigrants have gained hundreds of thousands of jobs since the Great Recession is said to have ended, while U.S.-born workers lost more than a million jobs, according to a study released Friday.

Native-born workers lost 1.2 million jobs in the year following June 2009, when economists say the recession officially ended, reported the Pew Hispanic Center, a division of the Pew Research Center. In that same period of time, foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs, according to the center, which based its analysis on statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Labor.

The disparity is even more extreme for the two-year period ending June 2010. During that time, foreign-born workers lost 400,000 jobs, while U.S.-born workers lost 5.7 million, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. As a result, immigrants outperformed native-born workers on unemployment rates. The unemployment rate for immigrants was 8.7% in June, the most recent month cited in the study, compared to 9.7% for U.S.-born citizens. During the one-year period ended in June, the immigrant unemployment dropped by 0.6 percentage point, but it gained 0.5 point for native-born workers.

"[Immigrants] started taking an earlier and harder hit during this recession and it could be now that things could be turning up for them sooner," said Rakesh Kochhar, association director of research at the Pew Hispanic Center and co-author of the study. "Native-born workers should soon catch up with them."

One of the reasons why immigrants tend to outperform native-born Americans is because they're willing to take less desirable jobs, said Kochhar.

"They're generally more flexible," he said. "They come here to work. They don't care necessarily whether it's in New York or L.A. or Dallas or Atlanta. They also tend to be more flexible in regards to the wages and the hours they put in."

Please visit CNN Money for the full article

http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/29/news/economy/jobs_immigrants/index.htm