While highly educated immigrants represent a sharply growing number nationally, Austin and other Texas metro areas continue to have larger numbers of low-skilled immigrant workers, according to a national study released today.
The report by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program shows that the number of immigrants in the United States with college degrees has grown larger than the number of low-skilled workers without a high school diploma, a change fueled by the nation’s demand for high skilled workers and the prevalence of H-1B visas for specialty workers over the last decade.
The study authors conclude that cities in border states with fast-growing immigrant populations - like Austin - are home to more low skilled workers than those with slower immigration rates. According to the study, more Mexican immigrants were likely to be low-skilled than immigrants from other countries.
Because the study uses numbers gleaned from the metropolitan-level summary tables of the 2009 American Community Survey (ACS), it doesn’t reflect more recent trends in immigration to Texas. As the American-Statesman reported on Sunday, immigration lawyers and economic development officials report a sharp rise in the number of wealthy Mexican business owners and entrepreneurs moving to Austin in the last year because of rising drug-related violence, especially in the Monterrey area.
While the study does not capture that more recent trend, it offers a glimpse of the city’s immigrant population circa 2009 and compares it to other cities and the nation.
The study’s chief finding is that high skilled immigrants (those with a college degree and above) now represent 30 percent of the entire immigrant population (including legal and illegal immigrants). Meanwhile, low-skilled immigrant workers make up 28 percent of the national total. That’s a sharp decrease from 1980, when 40 percent of the nation’s immigrant population were classified as low skilled and just 19 percent were high skilled.
In the Austin area, 29.1 percent of immigrants have college degrees, while 40 percent lack high school diplomas. That ratio puts Austin slightly below the national average, but ranks the city highest among the Texas cities in the study.
Houston ranks second, with 22.3 percent of its immigrants with college degrees; Dallas-Ft. Worth follows with 21.6 percent; San Antonio has 18.5 percent; and the McAllen area trails with 10.9 percent.
And according to the study, the Austin metro area is home to 249,240 immigrants, or 14.6 percent of the area’s 1.7 million residents. That percentage is lower than Dallas or Houston, but higher than San Antonio, where 11.3 percent of the population are immigrants, according to the study.
The study found that while border states like Texas and Arizona were home to a larger percentage of low-skilled workers, cities in the northeast, Pacific northwest and industrial areas in the Midwest are home to larger percentages of high skilled workers.