This week, our blog post assignment is to pick a debate topic from “Room for Debate” in the New York Times website and discuss about it. The topic I picked is “Do immigrants take jobs from American-Born workers?” I chose this topic to discuss because I am an immigrant from China. I am running a nail salon in Media, PA.
A recent essay in The Atlantic said that while economists generally feel the immigration helps the United States, an analysis of government figures shows that the growth in jobs since the recession has benefited only lower-paid immigrants. To this article, there was a debate set up and a question was mentioned---Do immigrants take jobs away from working-class citizens or has that threat
American economic stability been exaggerated? There were three people stated their opinions on question.
The first person is Steven A. Camarota, a director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies. He used a number of statistics to say that, with the help of federal government, the immigrants are taking jobs away mainly from the less-educated black and teenagers.
The second person is David Dyssegaard Kallick, a senior fellow at the Fiscal Policy Institute. He said that the immigrates fulfill the labor markets' shortages. A lot of immigrants are both employees and employers. They are the contributors to local economic growth. The "aging U.S. is revitalized by immigrants."
The last person is Maria E. Enchautegui, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute. She said that the immigrants are replacing, not displacing, those jobs that don't require secondary degree, interaction with public, licensing, and supervisory skill. For these kinds of jobs, the America-born workers have little interest to compete for.
I have been to this country since August, 2010. In terms of my own experience in working as a manicurist and studying at Delaware County Community College, I believe the immigrants are performing better in finding some jobs which don’t require interaction to public than the American-born workers.
From the first day in this country, I was busy in finding a job. Initially, I was looking for a white-collar job. But since I didn’t speak fluent English and was not able to entertain people, I failed. Then I started looking for a service job like waiter. However, no restaurants hired me due to have no experience. One month later, I found a “job” at a nail salon. The owner of the salon made a deal with me. They would give a chance to learn how to do nails if I could clean all the pedicure chairs and manicure tables. They paid me zero wages and I paid them zero tuition. After one month, I started working and eventually earned my first dollars. That was the moment when happiness knocked my door. Now I am still doing this job. The only difference is that my status was transformed. From February, 2015, I became a owner of a nail salon and started working for myself. I am not the only one in hundreds of thousand immigrants who successfully achieved financial independence. Although most of the immigrants have difficulties in finding jobs in the beginning of American life, we must believe someday we can find a job. Because there is no room for us to rely on, and no job means no food to eat and no place to live. It sounds stressful, but it drives us to look for a job all the time.
Though I am running a nail salon, I have never forgotten the purpose that I want to go to school. From January, 2015, I started to go to school at Delaware County Community College. As a foreigner, obviously English was my weak point. Whenever I took liberal arts courses, I struggled for reading and writing. In most time, it was really hard for me to catch up with the classes. The only thing I could do was to try my best to work hard. Comparing with me, all the native students have no problems in reading and writing. As long as working hard, they should perform very well academically and get good grades. However, the reality was right opposite. I could get high grade in every section test and final exam which was always higher than most of the American-born students. Take my Public Speaking class for instance, I have given one introduction speech and one informative speech in this semester. I am one of the only two students in my class who got A for both speeches. For each of the speech, I practiced countless times so that I would perform very well in class. When I listened to other American-born students gave speech, it was visible that they were not organized at all. They stood in the front of classroom and read whatever they wrote. Again, I am not the only one foreigner student at school. I see most of my foreigner classmates work hard. English is not our mother tongue, but we make up for our shortages with a sincere attitude, the attitude that we must make effort without any reserve so that we can get rid of the poor jobs and find a decent job same as what the educated American-born workers do, like white-collar jobs.
America is a country of immigration. Everyone should have equal opportunity to achieve whatever they dream for. No matter the person is white, black, or yellow, as long as they can make a contribution to this society, they should be treated equally. My own experiences combined with the statistics (saying the net gain of employment has been obtained by the immigrants) reflect, at least partly, the truth that the immigrants indeed have taken poorer jobs more than the American-born workers, because they make much more efforts.