Harborside's story is hardly unique. Foreign-born workers now make up nearly 15 percent of the U.S. workforce and 20 percent of workers in low-paying jobs. For many of their employers, English-language skills — or the lack of them — pose the biggest concern. Often, solving the problem is a simple matter of translating signs and company documents. It's a harder fix when immigrant employees have direct contact with customers, a common occurrence in the fast-food and accommodations industries.

At Carlson Hotels Worldwide, a hotel franchisor whose brands include Radisson and Regent International, immigrant workers are rewarded for improving their language skills. According to Carlson human-resources vice president Robert Fox, the company wants to offer promotion opportunities to many of its recent immigrant workers. "Often the housekeepers or laundry staff don't speak English," says Fox. "We're very much OK with that. But for these workers to move up, they need better language skills." The company offers self-study training for non-English speakers. It has even started experimenting with a portable electronic game called Sed de Saber ("Thirst for Knowledge"). "When you have someone with a great personality who hasn't missed a day of work, you know they'd be great at the front desk," says Fox. "But you need to have someone who knows English." — D.D.

Drain or Gain?

When Mark Krikorian hears business executives pleading for more-lenient immigration laws, he gets worked up. Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, believes the requests are self-serving — and disingenuous. Corporate calls for more immigration, he says, "are really just demands for a subsidy from the federal government."

Krikorian, whose group wants more limits on immigration, dismisses the argument that tightening labor markets force businesses to hire foreign-born talent. If companies paid better salaries, he claims, they would attract plenty of homegrown talent. He also believes employers can use technology to automate some jobs out of existence. As proof, Krikorian cites Congress's 1964 decision to end the guest-worker program for Mexican farm laborers. At the time, Californian tomato farmers protested vigorously, claiming that the industry would grind to a halt without the immigrant workers. But rather than go out of business, the growers took a different approach: they invested in harvesters. The production of tomatoes quadrupled and the postinflation price fell. "Massive immigration," says Krikorian, "removes the incentives to replace labor with capital."

Bill Stephan, CFO of Harborside Healthcare, agrees — to an extent. To cope with a nursing shortage, he is looking more closely at ways to use technology to automate the paper shuffling that occupies much of nurses' time today. "This will make them more productive," he says. "But by itself it's not the answer. We need a flow of young people from abroad who are willing to study and take these jobs."

Likewise, Elizabeth Dickson, immigration-services adviser for industrial-equipment maker Ingersoll-Rand, believes that automation gets you only so far. "Over the last 10 years especially, we have tweaked and automated as much as possible," she notes. "But in the end, you still need people on the assembly line. You need welders to glue things together, and you need machinists."

And while economic studies show that increased immigration does lead to reduced wages in certain sectors — textiles, for one — the overall impact is quite different. Immigration has risen over the past 20 years, yet unemployment has declined and median real family income has risen. Part of the reason: many native workers have moved to higher-wage professions. But economists point out that immigrant workers boost local economies, too, both as consumers and entrepreneurs.

In fact, a 1997 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that immigrants may contribute as much as $10 billion to the U.S. economy each year. And that figure doesn't include the billions of dollars that immigrants (both documented and undocumented) pay into the Social Security fund — money many are not likely to ever get back. — D.D.

• « previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4