Hispanic workers accounted for more than 1 million of the 2.5 million new jobs created by the U.S. economy in 2004. But Hispanics are the only major group of workers to have suffered a two-year decline in wages and they now earn 5 percent less than two years ago, according to a Pew Hispanic Center analysis of latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau.

“The statistics are clearly showing that the recently arrived Hispanics are paying the price of exploitation,” said Ana Avendaño, policy analyst from AFL-CIO. “There is no legal path to legalization for them. Latinos are paying that price because of lack of enforcement of labor laws and a broken immigration system.”
Avendaño insists that one has to ask “who is benefiting from this entire scheme. The corporate world has now the advantage of a huge pool of workers without any bargaining power. Of course, employers prefer these workers.”

According to Avendaño, policies such as the REAL ID Act are doomed to failure. “The statistics and history has shown that this kind of military policies has not worked. Because of these policies, workers are driven further underground, and still we are not securing the borders.”

Recently arrived Hispanic immigrants were a leading source of new workers to the economy but also among the principal recipients of wage cuts in 2004.
“Despite strong demand for immigrant workers, their growing supply and concentration in certain occupations suggests that the newest arrivals are competing with each other in the labor market to their own detriment,” said the report’s author, Rakesh Kochhar, a senior research associate at the Center.

The vast majority of new jobs for Hispanic workers were in relatively low-skill occupations calling for little other than a high school education. In contrast, non-Hispanic workers secured large increases in employment in higher-skill occupations requiring at least some college education.

“Hispanics and whites, the two largest groups of workers in the economy, are finding new jobs in such different occupations that they appear to be on separate paths in the labor market,” said Kochhar, a veteran labor economist.
This polarization contributed to a growing gap in earnings between Hispanic and non-Hispanic workers. The fall in wages for Latinos was greatest among immigrants who arrived in the United States in the past five years. Thus, the new immigrants who are enjoying significant growth in employment are doing so at the expense of lower wages. This trend is, no doubt, exacerbated by their concentration in occupations calling for minimal skills and education.

“The Pew Hispanic Center hit it head on,” said Charles Pamez, Director of Development with League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). “We spend our time working instead of going through the educational ladder. In the jobs Hispanic take you don’t even need a High School diploma.”
Now that the educational programs that directly benefited Hispanics are being cut and/or eliminated “the gap only gonna get bigger. Hispanics receive the lowest amount of financial assistance for educational purposes of any other group,” affirms Pamez.