Job Market a Flash Point for Natives, Newcomers : Labor: Are immigrants taking away work? The reality is a complicated mosaic of contradictions and ambiguity.

Michele Wargo-Sugleris went back to school six years ago to become a registered nurse, figuring that nothing would stand in the way of her finding a good hospital job after graduation.

But after receiving her degree this year, Wargo-Sugleris, 38, spent five frustrating months hunting for work in the Los Angeles area, running into a barrier she never expected: a job market packed with foreign-born nurses, including many who entered the United States on temporary work visas.

When Americans compete against foreigners for U.S. jobs, she said, “somebody gets hurt. Somebody gets left out in the cold, and I don’t want it to be me. I was born and raised in this country. . . . If Americans want those jobs, they should be able to get those jobs.”

At a time when tensions are running high over immigration, the job market is one of the flash points. This is especially true in California, where foreign-born workers make up more than 25% of the civilian labor force.

In a recent Los Angeles Times Poll of 1,162 Californians, the issue of immigrant workers taking jobs from Americans was rated as the second-worst consequence of immigration for the state; the only problem cited more often--almost twice as often--was immigrants’ use of welfare and government services.

But are legal and illegal immigrants and other foreign-born workers living temporarily in this country truly taking significant numbers of jobs away from U.S. natives?

The reality is a complicated mosaic of contradictions and ambiguity, befitting a nation built by immigrants that now is up in arms over immigration.

Since the early 1980s, the standard wisdom among researchers was that immigrants pose little threat to American workers’ wages or job prospects. Immigrants, experts contended, frequently provide needed manpower in the U.S. economy, particularly during boom times.

But changing circumstances and the arrival of fresh data from the 1990 U.S. census have prompted immigration specialists to begin reconsidering their views. Some experts have started speculating that the heavy immigration during the past decade and the slower job growth in recent years may have thrown immigrants and U.S. natives onto a collision course, particularly in immigrant-rich and economically battered California.

“You can absorb immigrants without displacing natives in an economy that’s growing,” said Michael Fix, director of the immigrant policy program at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington. “In a stagnant economy, it’s a lot more difficult.”

George Borjas, a UC San Diego economist, contends that one of the major U.S. economic trends of the 1980s--the growing gap in earnings between high school dropouts and more highly educated Americans--was partly the result of immigration. A big influx of poorly educated immigrants, he says, led to more competition for jobs at the lower rungs of the economic ladder--and produced lagging pay.

The resulting tensions are most visible in the construction industry and other businesses where unemployment is up and immigrants are especially prominent on payrolls.

That friction is cited as one of the factors that, after last year’s riots in Los Angeles, prompted black community leaders to fight for more reconstruction work for African-Americans. Union organizers say that among local Anglo and Mexican-American construction workers, too, the widespread use of low-paid, non-union immigrant laborers has sparked bitter feelings.

“They say you’re never going to do this (organize a union) as long as the Mexicans keep coming in,” said Jesse Martinez, financial secretary for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters Local 309 in the San Gabriel Valley.

Protests against foreign-born workers also have surfaced among electrical engineers and registered nurses, along with computer programmers.

Impact Is Debated

Yet aside from these complaints in scattered industries, job placement specialists say surprisingly few job hunters express concerns about competing against foreign-born workers.

“I haven’t had one case when someone said: ‘I was let go because they hired an immigrant,’ ” said Angel Camino, a 15-year veteran of the California Employment Development Department in Anaheim. “In my opinion, it’s more a perception than anything else.”

Why has the influx of foreign-born workers into the job market generally taken a back seat in the immigration debate? Mainly because several safety valves have eased social tensions and any possible economic impact.

For one thing, many immigrants are taking menial or physically punishing jobs that few Americans want.

“They’re willing to do anything to get a job. The employers can (cheat) them, pay them $3 (an hour),” said Paul Corswell, 19, a retail salesman from South-Central Los Angeles. “As for me, I demand more than $4.25, more than $4.75. . . . Nobody should have to work for nickels and dimes.”

Moreover, some experts say that immigrants--in their roles as taxpayers and consumers, as well as workers and as job-creating entrepreneurs--are a net plus for the U.S. economy, even taking into account increased costs for welfare and other government benefits.

So, simple economics does not explain the public’s testy mood.

Indeed, much of the protest over immigrants supposedly taking away U.S. jobs appears to be coming from Americans removed from the front lines of job competition.

In large part, “what is bugging the people who are making the noise about this (are concerns) about how the ethnic and racial makeup of the country is changing,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, head of the immigration policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Even before the experts draw conclusions from the newly released census data, some key points stand out in weighing the ethics and economics of immigration’s impact on the job market:

* When foreigners come to the United States looking for work, the big losers economically are fellow immigrants who arrived just a little earlier--and the big winners mainly are American employers and consumers.

“It’s very simple. The bosses look for the cheapest labor,” said Francisco Trana, an illegal immigrant from Nicaragua trained as a nurse but working in Los Angeles as a building painter for $45 a day in cash. “Everyone knows the situation with illegals, and the bosses know it too. The illegals have to work for whatever they’re offered.”

Indeed, the economics of some major California industries, such as apparel manufacturing, would collapse without low-wage immigrant labor.

* The latest census figures, gathered before the recession struck California, show that immigrants to the state during the 1980s flocked mainly to growing fields that produced thousands of new jobs.

In those occupations, employment generally expanded rapidly for immigrants, a category including naturalized U.S. citizens and foreign-born non-citizens. But even if they did not gain as many new positions, American-born workers, too, were employed in greater numbers over the 10 years.

The employment of immigrant cooks at bars and restaurants climbed by 73,410, the biggest gain in any job category. Among U.S.-born workers, 16,028 more got jobs as cooks.

* In a small number of occupations, the census found that immigrant employment climbed while jobs for American-born workers dwindled. California’s most dramatic example came in agriculture, where immigrant farm workers gained 50,960 jobs and American-born workers lost 25,062.

Immigrants also replaced native-born U.S. citizens in these low-paying occupations: hospital nursing assistants and orderlies, restaurant waiters and busboys, building janitors, garment sewers and hotel maids and housemen.

* The census data shows some dramatic declines in African-American employment in fields where immigrants made big gains. While the number of black, U.S.-born bank tellers fell 39% to 3,555, the figure for foreign-born tellers climbed 56% to 15,679.

Likewise, while employment of African-American hotel maids and housemen dropped 30% to 2,846, the immigrant total skyrocketed 166% to 32,273.

Effects on Blacks

Blacks “have been squeezed into a smaller segment of the economy,” said Roger Waldinger, a UCLA sociologist who has studied competition for jobs between less-educated, less-skilled blacks and immigrants in Los Angeles County.

Where those groups meet in the job market, the conflict can be palpable.

Darnell Jackson, 40, of South-Central Los Angeles, works part time as a janitor but says he has been unable to find steady, full-time work since he was released from prison eight years ago after serving a term for passing bad checks. He blames competition from immigrant workers--particularly illegal immigrants--for some of his job-hunting problems.

Illegal immigrants “can come and say anything on their job applications,” Jackson said. Employers “can’t do a background check on them, but they can do a massive background check on me or other U.S. citizens.”

Still, another recent study found that blacks actually fare better economically in regions with lots of immigrants. One explanation: The expansion of immigrant populations leads to more government and service jobs, many of which are filled by better-educated blacks.

And many people, both inside and outside the African-American community, do not regard the movement of blacks out of low-paying fields as a reflection, necessarily, of discrimination by employers.

Pearl Daniels, 58, a black resident of Koreatown, used to sew garments as a pieceworker for an apparel manufacturer. After being laid off a dozen years ago, she decided to look for work in another industry largely because the apparel contractors “were so cheap, and you had to work so hard.” She now works as a telephone switchboard operator.

“Most black people have an economic standard where they want a little bit more,” Daniels said.

Likewise, the movement of blacks out of hotel jobs resulted largely from the stigma attached to the business, said Solomon J. Herbert, editor and co-owner of the Black Convention, a North Hollywood publication aimed primarily at blacks in the hotel and tourism industries.

“Young people don’t see beyond just waiting on tables and turning beds. That’s their perception of the hotel industry. They don’t see potential to rise to the top,” Herbert said. Immigrants “are hungrier than we are.”

To immigrants, complaints about foreigners taking jobs away from Americans often seem unfair, if not absurd.

Take Guillermo Arias, a 30-year-old Guatemalan who obtained political asylum in the United States in 1989 and lives on a block of small, crumbling homes in Hollywood.

He tries to support his family of five with the odd jobs he picks up--like so many casual immigrant laborers in California--by hanging out on street corners, waiting for construction subcontractors or other employers.

Short, broad-shouldered and youthful, Arias says few U.S. workers appear at the casual labor sites. “Americans aren’t going to work for one day without any promise of anything else,” he said in Spanish.

But on the rare occasions when American workers do show up, employers “will take the Americans first because they speak English, and they’ll pay them a little more,” Arias said.

Arias says immigrants, too, feel the sting of competition in the labor market. When newer arrivals show up on the street corners to find work, he says, they will accept any job--even for as little as $4 an hour.

“The new person will be so anxious to work, he’ll accept the minimum, while other people try to hold out for $6 or $7 (an hour), because they have families,” Arias said.

The arrival of new low-wage immigrant workers, particularly illegal immigrants, also means damaging competition for some employers. Shirley Jenkins, a silk plant retailer and wholesaler from Carson, said she has been underpriced by competitors who hold costs down by using illegal immigrant workers.

“You can’t compete because you’re trying to be straight and legitimate,” Jenkins said.

Overall, though, employers richly benefit from immigrant labor. The greater the supply of workers, the easier it is to fill openings--and the lower the wages fall.

In fact, government regulators say employer exploitation of immigrants is widespread in California’s apparel manufacturing, agriculture and construction industries.

Competitive Edge

Yet even non-exploitative employers sometimes say they prefer hiring immigrants because of their attitude toward work. And once immigrants make inroads at a firm, their numbers usually grow. When jobs become available, employers often find it easier to hire the friends and relatives of immigrant employees than to advertise the openings publicly.

Barry Byalick, the owner of a small specialty printing shop in Gardena, said he often has had better luck hiring immigrants than U.S.-born workers during his 13 years as an employer.

“They don’t demand top pay as soon as they walk in the door,” Byalick said. “If you’re fair to them, they’re fair to you.”

For workers, the competition from immigrants is felt most keenly in occupations where the job market has changed abruptly, such as nursing. Hospitals have cut positions for registered nurses, and experienced nurses are working longer hours--in many cases because their spouses have lost their jobs.

The result: new nursing graduates such as Wargo-Sugleris are having a tough time finding good hospital jobs.

“Compared to what RNs are used to, it’s a shock,” said Virginia Rusk, a health care consultant studying the registered nurse job market in Los Angeles and Orange counties for the U.S. Labor Department. “It’s, ‘Oh, my gosh. I thought I had a ticket for life!’ ”

Even for those upset about competing with foreigners for jobs, it is hardly a simple issue. Wargo-Sugleris recognizes from her experience how immigrants have contributed--and still contribute--to America.

Her in-laws came to this country from Greece. To care for her three children and to clean her Agoura Hills home, she has employed various housekeepers from Central America and Mexico. In a previous career, she was a controller for a Holiday Inn that relied largely on Latino immigrants to clean rooms.

Yet Wargo-Sugleris, who this month finally landed a job as an obstetrics nurse, draws a distinction between using immigrants for unskilled jobs and the type of work she does.

When it comes to the likes of chambermaids and housekeepers, she said, “there are no Americans standing out there who want that job--it’s hard work.” On the other hand, she said, “I’m not for giving someone (an immigrant) a job when there are 20 Americans looking for the job.”

About This Series

Today is the second in an occasional series, “The Great Divide: Immigration in the 1990s.” As debate about immigration grows more heated, the Times series will examine the significant issues for California and the nation.

The next article Friday takes a look at patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border.

Where Job Shifts Favor Immigrants

In a wide variety of occupations, U.S.-born workers dwindled as a portion of California’s labor force during the 1980s--and immigrants made big advances.

EXAMPLE 1: CONSTRUCTION LABORERS

Construction labor was a growing field in the 1980s for both U.S.- and foreign-born workers in California. But the expanding employment of immigrants exceeded the growth in jobs for American-born construction workers. 1980 Foreign-born: 17,860 jobs held (20%) U.S.-born: 73,320 jobs held (80%) 1990 Foreign-born: 73,341 jobs held (38%) U.S.-born: 120,451 jobs held (62%) *

EXAMPLE 2: HOTEL MAIDS AND HOUSEMEN

Job opportunities also expanded in the state for hotel maids and housemen. But in this job category, employment of U.S.-born workers actually declined, while all the gains were logged by foreign-born workers. 1980 Foreign-born: 19,598 jobs held (34%) U.S.-born: 23,660 jobs held (66%) 1990 Foreign-born: 32,273 jobs held (62%) U.S.-born: 12,140 jobs held (38%) *

OTHER JOB CATEGORIES

These are the occupations that experienced some of the sharpest declines in the percentage of jobs held by U.S.-born workers.

Total % U.S.-born, % U.S.-born, Change foreign-born Occupation 1980 1990 1980-90 workers, 1990 Farm workers 42% 22% -47.6% 139,360 Electronic assemblers 63% 34% -46% 32,558 House cleaners 64% 37% -42.2% 56,677 Food preparers 71% 45% -36.6% 33,662 Household child care 80% 55% -31.3% 14,552 Janitors 74% 51% -31.1% 45,166 Restaurant cooks 71% 49% -31.0% 110,270 Household maids 68% 47% -30.9% 11,280 Gardeners 63% 45% -28.6% 61,452 Drywall installers 91% 68% -25.3% 9,914 Roofers 88% 68% -22.7% 9,179 Painters 81% 65% -19.8% 26,004 Restaurant cashiers 85% 69% -18.8% 31,788

Source: U.S. Census data

Researched by RICHARD O’REILLY, Times director of computer analysis.