Vol. 73/No. 39      October 12, 2009

Some 38 million people born in other countries lived in the United States in 2008, about 100,000 fewer than in 2007, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of census data. Because these are estimates, the drop falls within the “margin of error,” but still represents a significant change.

Until 2008 the foreign-born population in the United States had increased both in percentage and absolute numbers every year since 1970.

While the number of immigrants legally admitted into the United States went up slightly from 2007 to 2008, the number of immigrants entering without papers declined.

The fastest growing number of immigrants have been from Mexico. In 1960 Mexicans made up 6 percent of immigrants in the United States; by 2007 they were 31 percent. Some two-thirds of Latino immigrants are from Mexico; close to 10 percent of Mexicans live in the United States.

There is of yet no indication that larger than usual numbers of immigrants are returning to their home countries.

The sharp cuts in construction jobs that began in 2005—before the general contraction in production that started at the end of 2007—hit Mexican and Central American immigrants hard. About a third of male Mexican and Central American immigrants are construction workers.

In December 2006, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) simultaneously raided six Swift & Co. meatpacking plants in six states. More than 1,200 immigrant workers were arrested. Hundreds more did not return to work.

Because of the grueling pace of production and low wages, turnover at Swift plants is as high as 70 percent each year. The meatpacking bosses succeeded in slashing real wages by almost 50 percent from 1980 to 2007 while increasing line speed. In spite of this, after the raid the company was able to rapidly hire U.S.-born white, Black, and Latino workers to take the place of those caught up in the raid. They also brought in large numbers of refugees with work permits from Africa, Burma, and other regions of the world.

While the administration of Barack Obama has scaled back high profile factory raids, the expansion of other measures such as E-verify, which allows bosses to check to see if workers have work authorization or valid Social Security numbers, have made it more difficult for workers without papers to get jobs.

This is not the first time that the number of immigrants and their percentage has dropped in the United States. Both began to decline in the 1930s during what is often called the Great Depression. That decline continued until the 1970s.

In 1965 the U.S. Congress amended the Immigration and Nationality Act. The amendments allowed immediate relatives of U.S citizens to come to the United States without numerical restrictions and abolished national origins quotas, which had been in place since 1924.

Immigration increased rapidly in the 1970s, especially from Latin America and Asia as U.S. capitalists sought to expand a section of the working class that was vulnerable to superexploitation. In 1970 about 4.7 percent of the U.S. population were immigrants, by 1980 that grew to 6.2 percent and to 12.6 percent in 2007.

In 1986, under the administration of Ronald Reagan, the Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed. Some 3 million undocumented workers were given amnesty and became legal residents. At the same time, the new law gave the government more tools to harass and intimidate undocumented workers and other immigrants and control the flow of labor across the borders.

One indication of the decreasing number of workers entering the United States from Mexico is that detentions by the U.S. Border Patrol declined 17 percent in 2008, even though the number of border cops increased by 6,000 in the past two years.

The economic crisis is also affecting state-to-state migration by working people in general. About 700,000 fewer people moved from one state to another in 2008 than in 2006, a 9 percent decline.  
 
 
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