We welcome you to JobBank USA and hope your job hunting experience
is a pleasant one. We hope you find our resources useful.
August 14, 2006
WASHINGTON - Did you know?
_Almost half of illegal immigrants enter the U.S. legally.
Much of the national debate has focused on illegal immigrants sneaking across the Mexican border. But about 45 percent come here legally as tourists, students, shoppers and businesspeople, according to a report this year by the Pew Hispanic Center. Then they "overstay" their visas.
_Most unskilled workers - in Mexico and elsewhere - will never get a chance to legally come to the U.S. to live, work and become citizens.
Seasonal employment is available through agriculture and nonfarming programs. But those jobs require workers to return home.
Their best hope for getting in legally to stay: Sponsorship by family members who are U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents. But even that can take 12 years or longer.
_A century ago, immigrants made up a greater percentage of the U.S. population than today.
The high-water marks for U.S. immigration came in 1890 and 1910, when the foreign-born accounted for 14.7 percent of the population, according to the U.S. Census.
Today, the nation has more foreign-born people than ever - 21.1 million, according to the 2000 Census. But that's only 11.1 percent of the population. One caveat: Some illegal immigrants avoided being counted in 2000.
_Many of our ancestors could not have legally emigrated to the U.S. under today's laws.
Many of the 12 million immigrants who came through Ellis Island - official gateway into the United States from 1892 to 1954 - had no family or specific jobs waiting. That would keep them out today.
Until 1924, most immigrants were let in - unless they were Chinese.
Before the 1920s, the United States had no caps on numbers of immigrants and relatively few restrictions.
Less than 1 percent of those coming through Ellis Island were barred, says Doris Meissner, who headed the INS in the 1990s. Among them: prostitutes, polygamists, anarchists those with "a loathsome or contagious disease" and anybody from China. Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in response to racist fears and anxiety about competition from cheap labor.
_Many first-generation immigrants in the past, just like today, clung to their old country's language and symbols.
Until World War I, for example, German was the basic language in some rural public schools in the Midwest.
_Immigration is fairly new in the Carolinas and most of the South.
An economically stunted South had few jobs to draw immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. North Carolina was particularly untouched: In 1900, it had fewer foreign-born residents than any other state.
Says historian Tom Hanchett of Charlotte, N.C.'s Museum of the New South: "The South had enough poor people coming off little bitty farms to work the jobs in the cotton mills. But in the North, the steel mills were so big that they pulled in people from Italy and Slovakia."
Email This Page!