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Immigrant workers are dying on the job at a far greater rate than native-born workers, a new AFL-CIO study of on-the-job deaths and injuries reveals.
Estimates show the number of foreign-born people living in the United States topped 33 million and accounted for nearly 12 percent of the population in 2003. Half of these people have arrived since 1990 -and the foreign-born population is growing at a rate of about 1 million per year. Estimates of the undocumented immigrant population range from 10 million to 12 million. More than half of the foreign-born population comes from Latin America, primarily from Mexico.
While the number of immigrants from Asia also has grown rapidly since 1960, the number of immigrants from Europe has declined considerably.
Immigrants currently make up nearly 15 percent of the entire U.S. workforce and account for nearly 50 percent of the net increase in the labor force during the second half of the 1990s.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2003, approximately 48 percent of the foreign-born workforce was Hispanic or Latino and 22 percent was Asian, compared with about 7 percent and 1 percent, respectively, of the native-born workforce.
In 2003, foreign-born workers were concentrated in service occupations (23 percent) and in production, transportation and material-moving occupations (18 percent).6 Compared with native-born workers, the foreign-born population is more likely to be employed in the construction, manufacturing, leisure and hospitality industries. Both foreign-born men and women were less likely to be employed in professional and related occupations and in sales and office occupations than their native-born counterparts.
In 2003, foreign-born, full-time wage and salary workers earned $154 less in median weekly pay than their native-born counterparts. For men, the difference was $229 per week, while for women the difference was $108 per week.
Workplace fatalities among all foreign-born workers increased by 46 percent between 1992 and 2002 (the latest figures available) and Latino workers fared even worse, with a 58 percent jump in on-the-job deaths in the same time period, according to Immigrant Workers at Risk: The Urgent Need for Improved Workplace Safety and Health Policies and Programs.
The increase in immigrant death rates far outpaces the growth in the number of foreign-born workers in the workforce. Between 1996 and 2000, the share of foreign-born employment increased by 22 percent, but the share of fatal occupational injuries among those workers jumped by 43 percent.
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