The proportion of immigrants employed in the U.S. is at the highest level in seven decades, the Bureau of Labour Statistics reports. Experts say that immigrants are expected to continue to spread throughout the U.S. economy and their impact will
increase in coming years.
While labour unions continue to fight efforts to allow hundreds of thousands of additional immigrants to enter legally each year, they have softened their opposition and are beginning to turn their attention to unionising the new arrivals.
Salaries of the immigrant workers range from an illegally low $3 an hour for supermarket deliverers to $100,000 per annum or more for software developers from India.
A study by the National Academy of Sciences found that immigrants especially the illegal, and unskilled from Mexico and the rest of Latin America have pushed down wages for American-born workers with less than a high school education by 5 percent.
Source: Steven Greenhouse, Foreign Workers at Highest Level in Seven Decades, New York Times, September 4, 2000.
For more on the Effects of Immigration
http://www.ncpa.org/pd/immigrat/effects.html
