Question

The Workforce: Immigrants vs General Population

It was suggested by Dr. Powell and others that the workforce numbers represented by immigrants is shaped like an hourglass. The top represents highly educated immigrants and the bottom represent low-skilled workers (i.e. equal numbers of each group). The labor market in the U.S., in general, looks more like a diamond where the majority of educated workers are in the middle.

Draw these two shapes with one shape overlapping on top of the other, while keeping in mind what these shapes represent. Then think about and describe the positive and negative impacts of immigration on the workplace. Use the illustration as a visual as you describe the positive and negative impacts. Support your reasoning with present-day examples.

Answer 1

The figure has been drawn below-

High Skill us General i immigrant Low Skill

Lets first see what this represents. What this figure is tellng us is that while US labor market, in general, is middle heavey (that is, has more opportunities and number of educated workers who are moderately skilled), the immigrant workers labor market is skewed towards the extremees (that is, immigrants are either very highly skilled or low skilled). Let us see its pros and cons-

• One benefit of this shape of immigrants labor market is that it provides the US with a huge amount of highly skilled labor- something that it might not be able to produce on its own. This is very beneficial for the growth of the economy..
• Another benefit is that if there were not low-skilled migrants in sufficient numbers, the US market would not have been able to provide for low skilled jobs (such as grape picking, house help etc) and that wouldve drive those costs way up.
• A disadvantage of this is that as most US labor is in the middle, there is a big mismatch in terms of skills required and skills posessed. If not for immigratio, this might have led to structural issues for the economy.
• Its also an issue that while so many immigrants have high skills, there might not be enough of these jobs in the US. After all, these jobs are highly paid and very specific, so their numbers are lowers. This may result in many highly skilled immigrants settling for middle jobs. This creates a mismatch between skills and jobs (may also affect structural unemployment).

A present day example of this phenomenon would be the stunning gap between different groups of immigrants. For example, Indians are a group of immigrants who are often highly skilled and are found in many high paying jobs. Many companies in the US have Indians leading them. On the other hand, Latinos as a general group are usually employed in low skilled jobs. Indians represent the upper half of the hourglass and Latinos the lower.