Immigration Laws: October, 2003 - Number #05

The number of poor Americans rose in 2002 to 34.6 million or 12.1 percent of US residents; the poverty rate among blacks was 24.1 percent. The poverty threshold for an individual was $9,183 in 2002 and for a family of four $18,392, based on 1963 studies that showed that poor families spent about a third of their income on food. The poverty line is the low-income food budget multiplied by three. Poverty-line calculations do not consider in-kind benefits such as Food Stamps and Medicare to be income.

Median household income fell to $42,400; per capita income declined to $22,794. The top one percent of US residents each received $293,000 or more.

Since welfare reforms were enacted in 1996, the number of recipients of cash assistance has fallen from 12.2 million to five million, with no rebound during the 2001-03 recession- the federal government provides a block grant of $16.5 billion to states to care for them. Adult recipients must work 30 hours a week, and the 2003 re-authorization is likely to increase this work requirement to 34 or 38 hours a week for parents with children older than six.

Under the major cash assistance program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a rising percentage of the $25 billion in federal and state spending is going for non-cash assistance, everything from transportation assistance to child care. Many recipients of these in-kind benefits do not receive cash assistance, and thus are not counted among the five million welfare recipients.

The US Census reported 39 million Hispanics in June 2003. In 2001, 34 percent of the 2.3 million Mexican-born US residents eligible for naturalization had become US citizens, compared to about 65 percent for other immigrants. The foreign-born population of the US reached 34 million in 2002, triple the 1972 figure.

The American Translators Association reported that its membership tripled to 9,000 during the past decade. California spends about $55 million a year on court interpreters, half in Los Angeles county, where interpretation is required in court cases in languages from Albanian to Zapoteco. Los Angeles county's Superior Court system uses 750 interpreters, 357 of whom are permanent employees who earn $265 for a full day and $147 for half a day; 85 percent of the interpreting in the county's courts is in Spanish. Defendants have a constitutional right to an interpreter, so if the court can't find one, a mistrial could be declared. About 91 percent of the people who take the test to be a certified interpreter fail it.

Labor. US nonfarm payroll employment fell two percent, from 132.5 million in March 2001 to 129.9 million in July 2003; 2.7 million US jobs were lost, including 400,000 to 800,000 that were believed to have been "outsourced" overseas, such as manufacturing jobs to China and call center jobs to India. The Philippines and Russia are also expected to gain jobs from US firms that move overseas.

California employment fell from 14.7 to 14.3 million. The unemployment rate was steady at 6.1 percent in September.

The US economy normally has to create about 150,000 jobs a month to keep the unemployment rate steady, and more than that if the unemployment rate is to be reduced. The IMF estimated that nine percent of US GDP is in the underground economy, and if nine percent of the US work force were also not counted, then employment may be higher than reported.

The lowest-paid 20 percent of US workers, some 26 million, earn $8.23 an hour or less, or $16,460 if they work 2,000 hours a year; the federal minimum wage has been $5.15 an hour since 1997. In 2003 dollars, the lowest 20 percent of US workers earned $7.55 an hour in the early 1970s, suggesting only a small real wage increase for those at the bottom of the wage scale. The poverty line for 2003 is $8,980 for one person, $15,260 for three, and $18,400 for four persons. (http://aspe.hhs.gov/poverty/03poverty.htm)

Inequality is increasing. The richest 2.8 million, one percent of Americans, had $950 billion after taxes or 15.5 percent of the $6.2 trillion in after-tax income in 2000; the poorest 40 percent of Americans had 14.4 percent. The top one percent had an average of $862,700 each after taxes; the bottom 40 percent an average of $21,100 each. The richest one percent pay 25 percent of federal income taxes, and the bottom 40 percent pay six percent of federal taxes.

In all probability, industrial countries will need more medical staff to care for aging populations. However, the number of applicants to US medical schools has fallen for the sixth straight year, to about 43,000 in 2002. Many pre-medical students are electing to become physician assistants, whose pay and prestige has been rising. The number of registered nurses in the US rose from two million to 2.4 million between 1998 and 2002. The average US nurse is 45, and the fact that about an eighth of nursing positions are vacant has helped to push up wages to an average of $44,000 a year.

Unions. About 13 percent of US workers, and 18 percent of California workers, belonged to unions in 2002. The largest union in California, Service Employees International Union, has 17 percent of the state's 2.6 million union members, in part because it was able to organize 160,000 home-care workers, people hired by the elderly with federal and state funds to assist them in their homes. The SEIU helped to create public authorities for in-house supportive services (IHSS) in 54 of 58 counties, and then negotiated contracts covering home-care workers with the newly created IHSS authorities.

About 54 percent of California's public-sector workers and 10 percent of the private-sector workers are union members.

The AFL-CIO, which represents 13.5 million workers nationwide in 65 unions, says that employers lawfully and unlawfully oppose union organizing campaigns, requiring employees to attend presentations that give the employer's anti-union point of view and, since penalties are weak, sometimes firing union activists. In its new Voice@Work campaign, the AFL-CIO says that US employers routinely violate a core ILO Convention that says workers should have the right to freely form or join unions. Many unions try to bypass NLRB-supervised elections and have employers recognize the union "voluntarily" when more than 50 percent of employees sign union authorization cards, the so-called card check procedure.

The United Automobile Workers reached an agreement with the Big 3 automakers in September 2003 that includes a two-year wage freeze, followed by wage increases of two and three percent in the last two years of the four-year agreement. In general, manufacturing unions are negotiating agreements that aim to maintain employment, but the UAW allowed the Big 3 to close up to 12 plants.

In October 2003, new regulations were announced that will require 5,000 US labor organizations, including local and regional unions with $250,000 or more in income, to file detailed financial reports, including estimating the time each union official spends on political activities, union representation matters, administration and on other business.

According to the US Department of Labor, in 2000 some 52 percent of private-sector workers had no employer-provided pension (apart from Social Security); 29 percent had defined-contribution plans only (pension benefits depend on contributions and their earnings); 12 percent had defined-benefit plans only (pension benefits depend on highest earnings and years of work); and seven percent had both defined-benefit and contribution plans.

Congress approved free-trade agreements with Chile and Singapore that include Nafta-style provisions allowing 1,400 Chilean and 5,400 Singaporean professionals a year to receive renewable one-year visas. Foreign professionals from these free-trade countries with a US-job offer can obtain visas to enter the US by presenting a US-job offer and proof of their education; these visas can be renewed indefinitely.

The US Supreme Court in March 2002 ruled 5-4 that unauthorized workers who are wrongly fired for union organizing are not entitled to back pay for the time they are jobless after their illegal firing. In effect, the court ruled that a worker's violation of immigration laws weighed more heavily than an employer's violation of labor laws. Union leaders denounced the decision, and the Mexican government asked the Inter-American Human Rights Court, an arm of the Organization of American States, to decide if the Hoffman Plastic decision complied with international law. The Human Rights Court in September 2003 ruled that migrants have the same rights as other workers, even if they can be deported, but the US does not accept the Court's jurisdiction.

Hector Becerra, "Interpreters' Emotions Are Inadmissible," Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2003. Steven Greenhouse, "Young Foreign Workers Fill Summer Shortages," New York Times, July 20, 2003.