Latino Job Seekers Find ‘Born in USA’ Not Enough

Youthful dot-com millionaires personified the nation’s economic boom. But the face of the recent slowdown looks a lot like Angel Casas.

Laid off from his construction job earlier this year, the Echo Park teenager still is looking for steady work. He and his unemployed girlfriend have delayed plans to marry and get a place of their own. The high school graduates have unpaid credit card bills, a $700 monthly truck payment and $30 jumbo boxes of Pampers to buy for their infant son, Angel Isaiah.

But the toughest thing, Casas said, is remaining dependent on his Mexican immigrant parents, who are working three blue-collar jobs between them despite little formal schooling. In a recessionary reversal of the American dream, many young Latinos born in the U.S. are struggling with higher unemployment than Latino immigrants, despite the advantages of generally better education and language skills.

“It’s frustrating sitting at home while they’re working so hard,” said Casas, 18.

His mother, Silvia, said in Spanish: “How is it possible that my son has a diploma and no job?”

The U.S. recession may be shaping up to be one of the mildest on record, but it has been brutal for the youngest workers. Recent university research shows that those younger than 25 have borne the brunt of the employment decline, accounting for more than half the total job losses among U.S. adults in 2001.

The fallout can be seen in the drop-off of blue-chip company recruiters on college campuses and in the pink slips doled out to Silicon Valley twentysomethings. But the downturn has been particularly challenging for non-college-bound minorities such as Casas, who increasingly are competing with older immigrants for entry-level positions.

The most recent data compiled by the Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center show the U.S. jobless rate for second-generation Latinos--the U.S-born, U.S.-educated offspring of at least one immigrant parent--at 9.4%, compared with 8.7% for first-generation immigrant Latinos. In February, the overall U.S. unemployment rate was 5.5%.

With many economists predicting muted job growth in the developing recovery, employment rates for young adults, typically the last hired and first fired, aren’t expected to rebound soon.

Young Latinos Future of the Labor Force

Experts say the long-term economic stakes are even higher for metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles, where young Latinos represent the future of the labor force. Facing stiff competition at the low end of the job market, many lack the higher education and skills to leapfrog into the middle class.

“We’ve got this huge labor pool that doesn’t have the training and education to go where the good jobs are,” said Robert Sainz, executive director of the Los Angeles Youth Opportunity Movement, which is working to boost youth employment rates in low-income neighborhoods.

Workers with less experience and seniority typically get squeezed when the job market gets tight. But researchers say the pinch has been more painful this time around.

The decline in employment among those ages 16 to 24 in 2001 totaled nearly 1.1 million workers, or 52% of the more than 2 million U.S. jobs lost last year, said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. The drop was much sharper than in previous recessions, with eight years of employment gains for younger workers wiped out in just 12 months.

In California, the unemployment rate for workers 16 to 24 climbed to 11.1% in February, compared with 4.7% for workers 25 to 64.

“This has been more like a depression than a recession for workers under age 25,” Sum said.

He said several factors are fueling the rise. For starters, there are more young adults entering the labor force, unlike during the early-1990s recession, when their numbers were dwindling. Young workers were heavily represented in hard-hit sectors such as temporary staffing. And there is evidence that companies starved for experienced employees during the good times now are holding on to more of that gray hair.

That has been an unwelcome surprise for job hunters such as Carlos Virgen, 21, of Lincoln Heights, who figured his greatest asset is his willingness to work cheap. Laid off from his minimum-wage retail jobs after the holidays, Virgen expected to find new work immediately. But he said the stores and warehouses where he has inquired are swamped with seasoned applicants.

“Some of them are pretty old, like around 40,” Virgen said. “I think employers like them better because they have more experience.”

Andre Bonyadie, a Los Angeles franchisee for Quizno’s Subs, said he recently received 200 applications for 40 positions at a new downtown location. He believes in giving young people a shot, he said, but finds that many are woefully unprepared for the workplace.

“They call at quarter past 4 to tell me they’ll be late for a 4 o’clock shift,” he said. “A lot of them can’t add or subtract--even the high school graduates.”

Experts say immigration also is playing a role in youth unemployment. Paul Harrington, another Northeastern University researcher who has studied the Los Angeles economy, said the huge influx of low-skilled immigrant labor into Southern California has created heated competition here for entry-level employment.

“You’ve got this tremendous overcrowding at the bottom of the labor market,” Harrington said. “That’s one of the reasons your kids are having a tougher time getting jobs.”

Many Lack Skills to Climb Higher

Fueled by heavy immigration from rural Mexico, the Los Angeles region is home to more minimally educated adults than any other U.S. metropolitan area, with 1 in 10 having six or fewer years of schooling, the nonpartisan Employment Policy Foundation reports.

Although these immigrants may lack education, they have proved extremely resourceful at securing work. The most recent data compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center show the U.S. jobless rate for first-generation Latino men at 7.9%, compared with 9.5% for their U.S.-educated, second-generation counterparts.

Experience explains some of the gap. Young workers of all races typically post higher unemployment rates than older workers in good economic times and bad. The average age of the nation’s 10 million second-generation Latinos is just 19, compared with 37 for first-generation Latino immigrants, the Pew analysis found.

Immigrants who can’t find jobs often create their own in the informal economy. Likewise, newcomers are willing to take jobs that U.S.-born workers don’t want, and they are much more wired into ethnic job networks, said Min Zhou, a UCLA sociology professor who has studied the phenomenon in Los Angeles.

But though Latinos born and educated in the U.S. may have loftier aspirations than their immigrant parents, many lack the skills to climb higher on the economic ladder.

Only 8% of California Latinos have a bachelor’s degree or more, compared with 33% of non-Latinos, according to a study by the nonpartisan California Research Bureau, a division of the California State Library. Most troubling, the study’s authors concluded, is that this education gap has proved stubborn, persisting into the second and even third generations.

Joel Perez, an unemployed 18-year-old from Boyle Heights, said he regrets not finishing high school. He has seen how hard his Mexican immigrant father labors in a factory, and he has no intention of following him there. That’s why he is working on getting his diploma and learning construction skills at a neighborhood training center.

“My mom keeps telling me I’ve got to complete [my course work] so I can get somewhere in life,” Perez said.

Experts say raising the skill level of Perez and tens of thousands of young workers like him is crucial to the future of California’s economy. Latinos currently are the second-largest group in the state’s labor force and will become the largest by 2025.

Working to Close the Gap

Studies have shown that nearly two-thirds of lifetime wage growth occurs in the first decade of a worker’s career. Thus, early bouts of unemployment can retard future earnings. Like moving objects in Isaac Newton’s first law, people employed early in their lives tend to stay that way. Sum has found that states that do a good job of putting teenagers to work even part time or in the summer are likely to see more of them gainfully employed down the road.

California, whose February unemployment rate was 6.1%, ranks among the worst in the country for employing teenagers, according to Sum’s research.

In the late 1990s, only 37% of California teens 16 to 19 were employed; that was eighth-lowest in the country, compared with 52% nationally. Los Angeles County ranked third-lowest of any metro area with only 29% of 16- to 19-year-olds employed. In February, Los Angeles County posted an overall unemployment rate of 6.4%, the highest in the five-county region.

Working to close the gap are groups such as the Los Angeles Youth Opportunity Movement, known as YO, which is part of a federally funded program begun in 2000 to boost the employability of high-risk youth. The task is daunting, said Jimmy Valenzuela, project coordinator for the local group, which targets Boyle Heights and Watts.

He said the typical client is a 17-year-old dropout from a low-income, single-parent home who reads at a fifth-grade level. Unlike many middle-class youths seeking employment to pad their college applications or to earn mall money, Valenzuela’s charges often have babies to support and families that need help with household bills. Despite having such adult responsibilities, most never have held a job and have little knowledge about how to get one.

For many young, urban job seekers, the YO program is their first introduction to basics such as resumes, cover letters and interview etiquette.

To date, the group has helped more than 700 young adults gain a toehold in the work force through subsidized work experience and private-sector jobs, Sainz said.

Still, even YO staffers acknowledge that their efforts are a drop in the bucket, given that more than 300,000 Californians younger than 25 are looking for work.

Many economists are projecting slow job growth in the near future, with no quick uptick in positions for the inexperienced or unskilled. Meanwhile, President Bush has proposed eliminating the government’s Youth Opportunity Movement grants as part of federal belt tightening.

Back in Echo Park, a steady paycheck still eludes Casas. He has been working on and off for a house painter and isn’t sure it will turn into long-term employment. But he and his family remain hopeful.

“We have faith in God that Angel will keep advancing,” said his father, Valente Casas. “In this country, if you don’t have work, you don’t have anything.”