Full Citation
Title: Immigrants’ U.S. Labor Market Disadvantage in the COVID-19 Economy The Role of Geography and Industries of Employment
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2021
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Abstract: While the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout have hit many workers in the United States hard, lockdowns in response to the initial wave of infections affected the employment of immigrants more than U.S.-born workers. Immigrants experienced steeper job losses and are more heavily concentrated in industries and regional economies with relatively high unemployment compared to the U.S. born. But after rising to higher peaks in 2020, the unemployment rates for immigrant men and women dropped below those of U.S.-born men and women by July 2021. This issue brief uses monthly U.S. Census Bureau data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine the extent of job losses and shifts in employment patterns among immigrant and U.S.-born workers from mid-2019 to mid-2021. It looks at the same three-month period in each year (May to July), as opposed to the last months immediately before the pandemic, in order to account for seasonal employment patterns. This analysis found a steeper drop in the number of employed immigrants than in the number of employed U.S.-born adults between May–July 2019 and May–July 2021, owing in part to border closures, slowdowns in visa processing, and other immigration restrictions that have reduced the total size of the foreign-born adult population. The total number of working-age immigrants (ages 16 and older) fell by 0.7 percent, or about 313,000 individuals, while the U.S.-born working-age population grew by 2.6 million. Over the two-year period, the total number of employed workers in the United States declined by 5.2 million, with immigrants accounting for almost 28 percent of that drop (1.5 million people) even though they comprised a smaller 17 percent of the workforce in mid-2019. Immigrants and the U.S. born experienced a comparable drop in their labor force participation (1 to 2 percentage points), but immigrants had slightly larger increases in unemployment.
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Authors: CAPPS, RANDY; BATALOVA, JEANNE; GELATT, JULIA
Publisher:
Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS CPS
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration
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