2:34 pm ET
May 21, 2015
Employment
The Unemployment Rate Dropped for Foreign-Born Workers in 2014
By
David Harrison
The unemployment rate for foreign-born workers in the U.S. fell to 5.6% in 2014 from 6.9% in 2013, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday, reflecting the overall firming up of the labor market last year.
The unemployment rate for the native-born fell to 6.3% last year from 7.5% in 2013.
Since 2009, when the national unemployment rate peaked, joblessness among foreign-born workers has fallen by 4.1 percentage points. The drop was 2.9 percentage points for the native born.
The report is compiled annually from the Current Population Survey. Foreign-born workers are those living in the U.S. who were not U.S. citizens at birth and who were born outside the country to parents who were not themselves U.S. citizens, according to the BLS.
The number of foreign-born workers kept rising. Last year, there were 25.7 million in the U.S., up from 25.3 million in 2013. They accounted for 16.5% of the labor force in 2014, up from 16.3% the year before and 15.5% in 2009, the year the recovery began.
The foreign-born worker labor-force participation rate—the share aged 16 and older working or looking for work–was 66.0% in 2014, higher than the native-born rate of 62.3%. Foreign-born workers are more likely than native-born workers to be male and more likely to be between the ages of 25 to 54, ages when the participation rate is highest, according to the BLS.
About 48.3% of the foreign-born workers in 2014 were Hispanic and 24.1% of them were Asian last year, according to BLS. The composition of foreign workers has shifted since 2009, with Hispanics’ share decreasing and Asians’ rising.
Foreign-born workers saw their median usual weekly earnings rise to $664 in 2014, up from $643 in 2013. The difference between the weekly earnings of foreign-born workers and their native-born counterparts narrowed slightly as well from $162 in 2013 to $156 in 2014. The earnings gap peaked at $173 in 2010 and has been trending down since.
Discrepancies in earnings reflect a number of factors, including differences in the educational attainment, industries and geographic distribution of foreign and native-born workers, according to the BLS.
The earnings gap closes at higher education levels, the agency said. Foreign-born high school graduates earned 84.3% as much as their native-born counterparts, whereas foreign-born workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher earned about as much as native-born workers.
Foreign-born workers in 2014 were more likely than native-born workers to be employed in services; production, transportation and material moving occupations; and in natural resources, construction and maintenance jobs, according to the BLS.
Foreign-born workers also were much more likely than native-born workers to have not completed high school. The BLS found that 23.8% of foreign-born workers had not completed high school compared with 4.6% of native-born workers. Foreign-born workers were also less likely to have attended college or received an associate degree. But 34.2% of foreign-born workers had graduated from college, a share roughly similar to the 38.2% of native-born workers who were college graduates. That share has stayed relatively steady since 2009.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/05/21/the-unemployment-rate-dropped-for-foreign-born-workers-in-2014/
