California Immigrants Do the Jobs You Don't Want to

Fibonacci Blue

There's been a lot misinformation about immigrants going around on Facebook, fact sheets with completely inaccurate figures ("More than 43% of food stamps are given to illegals") designed, essentially, to feed the anti-Latino diet of racists.

Immigration is a hot topic this election season, especially as President Obama has vowed to allow 800,000 young undocumenteds stay in the United States.

A new study by the California Immigrant Policy Center finds that newcomers (nearly half of Latino immigrants in the country are illegal) are hard at work, even in this economy:

The report, "Looking Forward: Immigrant Contributions to the Golden State 2012," says that more than a third of the Golden State's workforce is foreign-born and that, even in this time of high unemployment, Latino and Asian men are working at much higher rates than the general population. (Food stamps?)

A summary:

About 82% of all Latino and Asian immigrant men of working age (25-64) are employed, compared with 74% of U.S. born Latino and Asian men.

Latino and Asian immigrants are more likely to be self-employed and start their own businesses than non-immigrants of the same ethnicity, according to "Looking Forward."

And they do the jobs (of course) many native born people don't want to:

... Immigrants make up the majority of those involved in farming, fishing, and forestry (81%), grounds cleaning and maintenance (63%), production (58%), construction (43%), food preparation and serving (42%), transportation (41%), and personal care and service (37%) jobs.

More than one-third (34 percent) of Angelenos are immigrants. That's 3.4 million newcomers. Immigrants and their children make up more than half (53 percent) of L.A. County's population.

The most important fact? Immigrants are not really that foreign. Nearly half of California's children (48 percent) have at least one immigrant parent.

[@dennisjromero / djromero@laweekly.com / @LAWeeklyNews]