From: udcrusd@meaddata.com (Sylvia D'Cruz)
Subject: News Report: Chicago and immigrants (750 lines)
Organization: Mead Data Central, Dayton OH
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 17:55:37 GMT
Distribution: soc.culture.indian

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                  Copyright 1992 Crain Communications, Inc.
                            Crain's Chicago Business

                               February  24, 1992

Chicago's new  immigrants;
A surge of newcomers finds a labor market that rewards the skilled, strands the
uneducated

First of a two-part series; NEXT WEEK: Government response to newest
immigrant wave, and conflict with the black community

By LISA M. KEEFE
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 Indian  immigrant Mohnish Pabrai has never had to worry about deportation or
learning English or marrying to get a green card.

   The son of a wealthy New Delhi businessman, he graduated from one of
America's finest engineering schools in 1983, was recruited by Lisle-based
Tellabs International Inc. in 1984 and started his own software development
company, Transtech Inc., in the bedroom of his Naperville home last year.

   "I decided I would stay in the U.S. because it is such an open and fair and
straightforward country," Mr. Pabrai says.

   His firm, which develops software for such companies as J. I. Case in Racine
and First Chicago Corp., now has its own office space and five local employees.
He had revenues of about $ 3 million last year.

   Life as an immigrant in Chicago has been very different for Hoa Thi Pham.
The 46-year-old Vietnamese refugee came to Chicago last year with her three
sons, after three years in a refugee camp in Thailand.  She brought with her a
high school education and a work history as a bus driver in Vietnam.  But she
doesn't speak English.

   Even this brand-new Chicagoan realized that a factory  job  was no longer the
sure-fire path to secure employment that it used to be for immigrants.

   "I need something more steady," she says, through a translator.  "I need to
improve my English to get a more stable  job"  than she could find at a factory.
She hopes eventually to find work as a seamstress.

   Meanwhile, Ms. Pham depends on public assistance while she studies English.
Those funds, one son's wages as a welder and two additional roommates help her
make the rent on an Uptown apartment.  Even so, she concedes, the ends are
barely meeting.

   Chicago was built on the backs of immigrants, like Ms. Pham, who were willing
to come here with nothing and rebuild their lives from the ground up.  At the
turn of the last century, masses of newcomers from Europe toiled in the
factories and the slaughterhouses, and loaded the trains and freighters that
helped make Chicago a city that worked.

   They populated the Back of the Yards, Goose Island and South Chicago.  Their
wages poured into immigrant-owned businesses, creating Greektown and Ukrainian
Village and a score of other ethnic neighborhoods.

   Eventually, as they acquired more education and money, these immigrants and
their children helped build the early suburbs, including Cicero and Skokie.

Part of a national wave

   As the turn of the next century looms, Chicago is once again a city of
immigrants: Some 300,000 poured into the area in the 1980s, part of a national
wave of immigration that, in sheer numbers, rivals the great migrations of the
early part of this century and the middle of the last.

   But Chicago no longer has a limitless supply of  jobs  to offer them.  The
shift from a manufacturing to a service economy has eliminated thousands of
low-skilled  jobs  that have traditionally been the immigrant's first resort.
That bottom rung of the ladder to the American dream has been chopped off.

   Instead, the U.S. wants more immigrants like Mr. Pabrai, and so do local
corporations: Give us your educated, your talented.

   Increasingly, stories like Mr. Pabrai's are replacing the now-cliched tales
of immigrants who start at the bottom and inch their way, often over successive
generations, to the top -- or at least the middle.

   But Mr. Pabrai remains one of the exceptions, not the rule.

   A growing number of immigrants who've poured into the Chicago area in the
last decade -- and who continue to pour in -- are uneducated, and therefore
unprepared to take the entry-level  jobs  that, in the new service economy, are
rapidly replacing the foot-in-the-door factory  jobs  of the past.

   At the same time, some of the support networks that immigrants used to count
on to guide them into the American system are disappearing.  Churches and
synagogues, caught in financial straits of their own, no longer can afford to be
the benefactors they once were.  The federal government has slashed
once-generous aid to refugees.

   That leaves the city and other government and non-profit institutions to pick
up the slack.

   Public school budgets for bilingual education -- $ 60 million this year in
Chicago -- are swelling, and the schools are taking on resettlement
responsibilities far beyond education.  The city has staffed a new office to
handle immigrant affairs, funded at $ 400,000 this year.

   And while the costs in dollars and cents have yet to fully emerge, there is
ample evidence that immigrants from countries with backward health care systems
are putting new burdens on Cook County Hospital and nonprofit hospitals in
immigrant neighborhoods.

   "The times have changed tremendously," says Clarence Wood, head of Chicago's
Commission on Human Relations.  "What we had (with earlier immigrant movements)
was likeness, a defined economic strength and a common goal of upward
mobility." But with the new immigrants, he says, "we all have to be concerned
with how these communities become a full part of the system."

   Even recent newcomers following the classic immigrant-turned-shopkeeper route
to success have encountered a problem their predecessors never had to face: the
animosity of native-born poor blacks, who view the opening of immigrant-owned
small businesses in their rundown neighborhoods with a suspicion that frequently
erupts into confrontation, and occasionally into violence.

   The city and some of the suburbs have mounted at least token efforts -- and
in a few cases, aggressive programs -- to confront the shifting needs of these
new immigrants.  And a number of non-profit organizations are channeling
immigrants into  jobs  and housing.

   Business, meanwhile, has chosen to concentrate its energies on attracting
immigrants like Mohnish Pabrai -- immigrants who come to the U.S. equipped with
the education or technical skills necessary to fill the widening gaps in the
American labor force.

   Led by local companies like Motorola Inc., business is making its presence
felt in the halls of Congress, lobbying for measures that will address its
increasingly plaintive calls for an educated labor force in the next century.

   New immigration legislation passed last year, authored by Sen. Paul Simon,
D-Ill., sets aside 140,000 visas for highly educated, technically skilled
immigrants.

   The thrust of the legislation suggests that American business, disenchanted
with the prospects for near-term improvement in the U.S. public education
system, has made a subtle, almost unspoken, choice to import labor from abroad
rather than to educate it at home.

A chilling indictment

   "If you want to compete and hire good employees with good backgrounds, you
have to hire foreign nationals," says Jeff Heller, corporate counsel to Amoco
Corp. in Chicago.

   A more chilling indictment of our public school system is hard to imagine.

   The implications for the national and regional public education system go
even deeper.  Small and medium-sized local manufacturing companies advertising
skilled positions say the foreign born are usually the only qualified
applicants.  That leaves many native-born Americans, and a growing phalanx of
uneducated new immigrants, out in the cold.

   When employers snap up these skilled immigrants, they again make an implicit
decision not to hire or train native-born Americans.  As a result, unskilled
immigrants are joining unemployed minorities languishing in inner-city
neighborhoods, underserved by the public education system and, subsequently,
ignored by employers.

   The barriers confronting the latest wave of immigrants are only now emerging,
but the waves of people keep crashing, leaving no time to waste.

   How Chicago and its business community respond to the needs and demands of
these recent immigrants will decide whether the newcomers walk the now-mythic
paths to success that their predecessors followed, or get stuck in a two-tiered
system in which some languish at the bottom while others careen to the very top.

   Inside Machinery Components Inc.'s (MCI) unremarkable factory near west
suburban St. Charles works a mini-United Nations.

   A Laotian nurse, a Mexican civil engineer and an expert basket-weaver, also
from Laos, all work on the assembly line, piecing together starters and
alternators for cars.  A keypunch operator from India is the company's head of
shipping.  And a Polish-born machine tool operator handles quality control.

   About half of MCI"s workforce of 125 are immigrants or refugees.

   "We'll hire anybody from anywhere, as long as they understand enough English
to get the safety regulations, says Betty Baldwin, MCI's controller.

   The new immigrants go to work in the factories for the same reasons
immigrants have always been attracted to the gritty, relatively low-status
positions: The  jobs  require little English, little training and historically
have paid a livable wage.  Many newcomers take the unpopular third shift, or the
dirtiest  jobs,  to beef up their incomes.

Numbers surged in the 1980s

   Nearly 7 million legal immigrants moved to the United States in the 1980s,
more than in any decade in this century except the first, when 8.8 million
immigrants arrived.  Those figures don't include illegal immigrants, for whom
there are no reliable estimates, or refugees.  Another 880,000 refugees -- those
who had to flee their native countries for political reasons -- came to the U.S.
between 1980 and 1989.

   As with previous waves, many of these newcomers have ended up in Chicago.

   In 1980, 14.5% of Chicago's population was foreign-born, making it the
third-largest immigrant city in the country, behind New York and Los Angeles.
Between 1970 and 1980, even as the city's total population fell 10.6%, its
foreign-born residents increased by 16.4%.  Slightly more than half of Chicago's
current immigrant population arrived after 1965.

   "I think it's important that this country always have incoming immigrants,"
says Mayor Richard M. Daley, whose Bridgeport neighborhood has been home to
generations or Irish immigrants and their descendants.  "It's important for the
lifeblood of a country, or of a city."

   The newcomers share much with their predecessors.  Hoa Thi Pham's
determination to learn English; the resolve of the workers on the MCI production
line to work, even if work means tedious, low-paying  jobs  -- these are cliches
of immigrant life that were as true at the turn of the century as they are
today.

   But the new immigrants are different in significant ways.  Sheer diversity
sets them apart.

   This is true nationally, but particularly so for the Chicago area.

Chicago's special diversity

   Chicago attracts a broader ethnic cross-section than any other part of the
U.S.: Asians, who would otherwise tend to settle on the West Coast; Europeans,
who pass through similar immigrant communities in New York and New England, and
Latinos, who opt not to settle in the well-established Hispanic communities in
the Southwest, California and Florida.

   "Chicago is still a major magnet (for immigrants), with a wider range and
diversity than any other city" in the U.S., says Barry Chiswick, head of the
Department of Economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  "Chicago is
in the hinterlands and picks up immigrants from all over the world.  There is no
immigrant group that is not well-represented in Chicago."

   Consider a recent physical education class at Nicholas Senn Academy, a public
high school on the Far North Side: A Sikh youth, wearing a turban with his gym
uniform, had an African-American partner for a lesson in square dancing.  Or a
scene at O'Hare International Airport, as Southeast Asia refugees disembarked
from their plane, still clad in tribal wrap skirts and carrying hand-woven rice
baskets slung over their shoulders.

   Another important distinction between the new immigrants and the old is
education.

   For the most part, earlier immigrants shared rural backgrounds with minimal
education.  But the new immigrants occupy both ends of the education spectrum.
Some boast degrees from the world's finest universities.  Others have lived for
years in refugee camps, where living conditions are ghastly and formal schooling
unheard of.

   So, Chicago is home now to both the Russian refusenik computer programmer and
the Laotian farmer's wife who fled the country with the clothes on her back and
just two years in the classroom.

   Given the changes in the local and national workforce, the computer
programmer will probably have a much easier time finding a  job  than the
Laotian farmer's wife.

   Unlike earlier immigrants who started out at the bottom and worked their way
up, the recent wave of poorly educated immigrants may find themselves stuck much
longer, or perhaps permanently, at the bottom.

   "The earlier immigrants were poorly educated and poorly trained, but that's
exactly what the labor market needed.  And so those earlier (immigrants) tended
to be glorified," says Vernon Briggs, professor of labor economics at the School
of Industrial Relations at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

   But the U.S. is not the burgeoning young industrial nation it was 80 years
ago.

   The low-skilled assembly and piecework  jobs  that historically have employed
millions of less educated, non-English-speaking newcomers every year -- the kind
of  jobs  found at MCI -- are dwindling.  The economy is slowing and shifting
inexorably away from basic manufacturing and toward technology and service
industries.

   Nationally, production employment -- the type of  job,  often well-paying,
that is attractive to immigrants, plummeted from more than 40% of total
employment in the U.S. in 1955 to about 25% of total employment by the
mid-1980s, according to the Hudson Institute's 1987 study, "Workforce 2000."

   Even as the number of unskilled positions is decreasing, the number of
immigrants who would depend on them is increasing.

   "The  job  sectors that are growing are the mirror opposite of what the
immigrants are providing," says Mr. Briggs, whose specialty is researching the
nation's workforce.

   In the 1980s, roughly a half-million legal and illegal immigrants and
refugees, primarily from Southeast Asia and Latin America, ended up in Chicago.
Eventually, they scattered throughout the Far South and West sides, north, far
and near west suburbs.

   Many had spent time in refugee or re-education camps.  Largely uneducated,
they are dependent on relief organizations such as Travelers and Immigrants Aid
and refugee resettlement groups like the Vietnamese Assn. of Illinois and the
Elgin YWCA.

   "More recently, we have had a sizable decline in skill levels of immigrants,"
says George Borjas, professor of economics at the University of California at
San Diego and an author of books on the effect of immigrants on the economy.
"And that has all kinds of implications, from competing more and more with
native-born unskilled workers and more unemployment to increasing use of welfare
programs."

   National studies of welfare use by immigrants show that between 1970 and
1980, the percentage of immigrant households receiving welfare rose to 8.8% from
5.9%.

   Some of the families, particularly those headed by women, have received
welfare for decades.  And the longer the immigrants stay in the U.S., the more
likely they are to receive welfare, according to Mr. Borjas.

Welfare: downward mobility

   Local welfare statistics are not available.  But income statistics in largely
immigrant neighborhoods suggest downward mobility.

   In Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, where about two-thirds of the residents are
immigrants, real median household income plunged between 1979 and 1991.

   Based on figures compiled by Claritas Inc., a local unit of New-York based
VNU Marketing Information Service, real income in Pilsen dropped 11% between
1979 and 1991, to $ 16,661 a year.  For the city as a whole, real median
household income fell as well, by just 3%, to $ 22,840.

   Another measure of the immigrants worsening plight is  job  growth -- or
decline -- in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations.

   In Pilsen, the number of  jobs  eligible for unemployment insurance declined
15.7% between 1975 and 1990, to just under 28,000  jobs,  according to the
Illinois Department of Employment Security.  Next door, in the Little Village
area, the number of insured  jobs  dropped 20.7% in that time, to 30,149  jobs.

   In Uptown, home to a polyglot population of immigrants, the number of  jobs
dropped 10.3% in those 15 years, to 18,600  jobs.

   "Because of the decline of unions and manufacturing  jobs,  moving up to the
working and middle-class sector is harder," says David Marzahl, executive
director of the Chicago Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Protection, an
umbrella organization with 35 other groups as members statewide.  "These people
are locked in the service sector, where pay is lower."

   Not only are immigrants showing up with fewer portable skills, but an
increasing number have very little formal education.

   Census figures show that, nationally, the proportion of adult foreign-born
men with eight or fewer years of schooling increased to 26% in the late 1970s,
the latest period for which statistical evidence is available, from 22% in the
1950s.

   In comparison, in 1983, 15.1% of native-born adult men had eight or fewer
years of schooling, and 23% had at least a college degree.

   Latin Americans, who constitute nearly half of the legal and illegal
immigrants and refugees in the Chicago area, have the lowest education level,
averaging 11 to 12 years of schooling, a couple of years short of the average
for U.S.-born men.  However, Mexican-born men (Mexicans account for 85% of the
area's Latin Americans) average seven years.

   Again, the shift to a service economy exacerbates this change in the
immigrant profile.

   If immigrants traditionally start out in the lowest-paying  jobs,  and the
lowest-paying  jobs  -- for example, working as a fast-food cashier -- require a
command of English, they find themselves shut out.

   People who resettle immigrants say the lack of formal education makes
teaching them to speak English all the more difficult.

   "They have both a difficulty with the language and with the training," says
Mary Koblas, executive director of the Advisory Council on Immigrant and Refugee
Affairs for the city of Chicago.

   Adds Joan K. Berna, director of community services for the Elgin YWCA, which
offers a range of services to that community's extensive immigrant population,
"The more recent refugees have been in camps for a long time, and some are
illiterate, even in their own language.  So, the key is to find places for the
low-level English speakers."

   Rakthay Bounyavong, a Laotian who lives in Elgin, is a refugee who has
struggled with the language and with employment in this country.  A police
officer when the Communists took over the government, he was taken to prison and
tortured for six years.  After his release, he escaped, first to Thailand, then
to the Philippines en route to the U.S.

   Mr. Bounyavong studies English, and took a machine tool course at a local
community college.  But his English still is limited and he could only find work
at a local supermarket, as a janitor.

   "The machine tool course wasn't very helpful if I have to change professions
and be a janitor," he says, through a translator.

   Have skills, will prosper

   The sad truth is, the Chicago economy has a surfeit of people like Mr.
Bounyavong, and a shortage of  jobs  that he's qualified to fill.

   But immigrants who arrive with education and skills from their home countries
find themselves much in demand.  Local manufacturers say they routinely have
applications from, and end up hiring, a disproportionate number of immigrants
for skilled labor positions.

   At Gearex-Fulton Inc., a manufacturer of custom gears on the Northwest Side,
a recent  job  advertisement brought 75 applications, half of them from Polish
or Asian  Indian job -seekers.  According to Lynn Polydoris, Gearex's director
of operations, the  jobs  require vocational and technical expertise that is
part of the standard education in many other countries.

   Safco Corp., a Motorola supplier that makes testing equipment for cellular
telephones, increased assembly-line positions by nearly a third in the last 12
months.  About 75% of the applicants for those  jobs  were foreign-born, mostly
Asian  Indians,  and after filling the new  jobs,  Safco's overall immigrant
employee level surged to 30%.

'Not part of the decision'

   "The fact of being foreign-born is not part of our decision to hire," says
Robert Perodeau, manager of human resources for Safco.  "We're not reaching
specifically for that group.  But that's the group that's coming to us."

   Immigrants are filling a crucial need for skilled labor in the Chicago
region.

   "We have a substantial industrial base here, and we can expend it.  But we
need people who can work in those businesses without enormous amounts of
training on the part of the employer," says Ronald J. Gidwitz, CEO of Helene
Curtis Industries Inc. in Chicago and former chairman of the city's Economic
Development Commission.

   Increasingly, those people are immigrants who received the right education
and training in their home countries.

   So, Stanislw Kocol is a hot commodity in this town.  A design engineer who
works for ENM Co., a meter manufacturer in Chicago, Mr. Kocol immigrated to
Chicago from Poland in 1977 to escape that country's communist regime.

   He brought extensive training in mechanical engineering, acquired in Poland's
highly developed technical education system, and a master's degree in
metallurgy.  He worked his way through a series of industrial  jobs,  moving up
as his English improved.

   In Europe, he says, "they teach more in the high schools.  In my country, if
you went to high school, it's impossible not to know how to read and spell."

   Alex Etman is another newcomer who has fared better in the U.S. than many
recent immigrants can hope to.  Mr. Etman was a college-educated, high-profile
journalist at the state newspaper in his native Latvia, a foreign correspondent
who became head of the sports department at 24.  But he felt he had to leave the
country when his small son became the target of anti-Semitic preschool teachers.

   Within seven months of moving to Chicago in January 1990, Mr. Etman was
working as a manager for Premium Link Trading Co., in posh offices in One
Magnificent Mile.

   "I thought the U.S. was a great country," Mr. Etman say.  "I still think so,
but it's not so simple or easy as I thought."

   But he is doing what many Americans in his position would do: He's starting
his own business, a publishing firm that will produce a Russian-language
newspaper for the 25,000 Soviet refugees living in the Chicago area.  Mr. Etman
also hopes to produce a commercial directory of Russian businesses.

High-tech immigrants

   Meanwhile, at the high-tech end of the labor spectrum, companies like
Schaumburg-based Motorola say they can't find enough qualified workers
domestically, for one simple reason: We're not educating them.

   Just as the preponderance of immigrants applying for skilled manufacturing
 jobs  highlights the superiority of their foreign educations and training, the
dearth of local talent qualified to work at high-tech companies illustrates the
sorry state of science and math education in this country, and in this region.

   That gives businesses two choices: Improve the public schools, or import
talent from abroad.

   Last year, big business made it clear that it will pursue the second course
-- perhaps not as the only solution, but certainly as a leading one.

   A 10-year lobbying blitz by business culminated in the Immigration Act of
1990, which went into effect last fall.  The law, co-authored by Illinois' Sen.
Simon, gives preferential treatment to immigrants with education and high-tech
skills.

   Unlike earlier legislation, which made reunification of families its goal,
the new legislation targets the workforce needs of the changing U.S. economy.
Not coincidentally, it is the first piece of immigration law to reflect the
interests of the business lobbies.

   "I think the one emphasis (of the law) clearly is that we wanted to encourage
(highly) skilled labor, and particularly those who already have  jobs, " says
Sen. Simon.  "The need in our country is not for unskilled labor."

   The changes in the law have lasting implications for the local and national
workforce.

   The new law nearly triples the number of permanent visas available for people
moving to the U.S. specifically to work in a highly skilled or professional
position, to 140,000 annually from 54,000.

The winners

   The primary beneficiaries are engineers, corporate executives and other
educated individuals who are expected to bolster the economy and help U.S.
companies compete in the global marketplace.

   Most of the would-be immigrants must have a specific  job  waiting for them
before they apply to immigrate, but a few visas are set aside for exceptionally
talented people, such as artists and scientific researchers, to immigrate
without any specific  job  or personal ties.

   Another 10,000 visas are available for wealthy foreigners who invest money --
from $ 500,000 to $ 1 million -- in a new or existing company and create new
 jobs.

   The nation's major corporations will be the biggest winners.  Some companies
-- including Motorola, Hewlett-Packard Co. and IBM Corp. -- and business lobbies
spent as long as 10 years pushing for the new provisions.

   "There are very well-known shortages (of American-born personnel)," says
James Burge, corporate vice-president in Motorola's Washington, D.C., office.
"To pick one very critical to Motorola: software engineer.

   "We are confident we are not taking  jobs  away from Americans, because there
just aren't enough people to fill these  jobs  who were born in the U.S."

   Adds Phyllis Eisen, director of risk management for the National Assn. of
Manufacturers (NAM) in Washington, D.C.  "(The 'Workforce 2000' study) says we
have a skills mismatch, and we think we can help that with some key skilled
immigrants, which could allow us to expand here" in the U.S.

   "The changes in the law aren't designed to fill any big skills gaps, but they
are designed to tinker around the edges," she says.

   Engineering students, for example, are a favorite recruiting target of U.S.
companies.  And NAM estimates that 72% of graduate engineering students in the
U.S. are citizens of another country.

   Rafiq Mohammadi formerly belonged in that category.  He came to Chicago from
Pakistan to attend the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he enrolled as
an electrical engineering student in 1978.

   "We went to excellent Jesuit schools in Karachi and they stressed exact
sciences a lot," he says.

   Now, Mr. Mohammadi is a partner with MH Group Inc., a 4-year-old software
development firm in Chicago.  The 13-employee company grossed around $ 3 million
in 1991.

   Foreign-born managers in U.S.-based multinational companies also are a target
of the new legislation.

   Amoco Corp., for example, has 50 to 75 intra-company transfer applications
under consideration at any given time, estimates corporate counsel Mr. Heller.
The far-flung oil and gas giant moves executives and managers to the U.S. from
such places as England, Norway, Egypt and Switzerland.

   "In the technical positions for which we hire we can't afford to miss.  And
(some foreign managers') qualifications are so good," Amoco can't pass them up,"
says Mr. Heller.

   All of which points to the deficiencies in U.S. schools.

   "Most businesses expect to do some training, and some businesses do a lot of
training," says Joe Reed, a former vice-president of AT&T and retiring president
of Leadership for Quality Education, a non-profit organization in Chicago
dedicated to public school reform.  "The problem is that students in recent
years have fallen below the level at which training can even start."

A tacit admission?

   But isn't resorting to importing labor in the form of immigrants a tacit
admission that business doesn't have faith in the reform of American schools?

   "Businesses clearly are favoring immigrants over improving education for our
native-born students, particularly blacks and Hispanics," says Fred Hess,
executive director of the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance.
"But I don't think the people who make (the hiring decisions) in a company are
high enough up in the company to make the policy decisions.  They are working
just with what they are given."

   The bottom line for business is that it can't afford to wait and see if
education reforms work.

   "We need those talents now, and to remedy the education system, we're talking
about a decade or more before we see the fruits of our efforts," says Motorola's
Mr. Burge.

   But the decision to pursue immigrants to fill  jobs  that could be filled by
properly educated and trained Americans will have long-term consequences.

   "We are spending money on remedial classes -- literacy programs, English as a
second language, basic skills programs," says Cornell University's Vernon
Briggs.  "I would much rather see that money spent on secondary education and
apprenticeship programs -- those programs that deal with actual skills and
education -- not just money spent on bringing people up to a basic level.

   "The skills problem exists, and the immigration policy is making it worse."

Bilingual education spending

   Indeed, the acknowledgment that immigrants will fill an increasing number of
available  jobs  is borne out, ironically, by the Chicago Public Schools'
budgets for bilingual education and vocational training.

   The total Board of Education budget rose 30% to $ 2.4 billion between the
1986-87 school year and the current school year.  In the same period, the budget
for vocational education rose just 10% to $ 80.3 million, and it fell to 3.3% of
the total budget from 3.9%.

   Money for bilingual education, however, increased more than 50% in those five
years, to $ 60 million, and rose to 2.5% of the total budget from 2.1%.

   Putting immigrants' needs ahead of those of native-born Americans concerns
Nancy Jefferson, a long-time West Side activist and chief executive officer of
the Midwest Community Council.

   "At (a recent) Illinois Human Rights Commission meeting," she says, "we were
dealing with the elaborate program we're going to have to have to help the
immigrants get adjusted to our country.  I think (the money) ought to be spent
(for immigrants), but we don't have to balance that budget on the backs of those
who were born here.  We have an obligation to our native-born first, and then
(we can) take care of other folks."

   Concludes Ron Gidwitz: "The immigrants are helpful, but the need is too
great.  Politically, as well as practically, I don't think we can get away from
the fact that we have to rely on our native population to fill the gaps."

Helping native-born, too

   Sen. Simon agrees, and says that when discussion of a higher-education bill
comes up in the next session of Congress, he will introduce legislation that
will address some of business' concerns with better training of native-born
Americans.

   Sen. Simon also wants to revamp the  Job  Training Partnership Act, which
provides funding and guidelines for programs to re-educate older workers whose
skills are outmoded.

IMMIGRANT POPULATION IN ILLINOIS . . .

1901-      695,956
1910 {+}

1911-      422,073
1920

1921-      266,619
1930

1931-       28,839
1940

1941-       58,210

1950

1951-      173,901
1960

1961-      181,921
1970

1971-      186,243
1979 *

1982-      290,243
1990 **

   * 1980 data not available

   ** 1981 data not available

   {+} Land arrivals not completely enumerated until 1908
Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
CRAIN'S/KIMBERLY MART

. . . MIRRORS IMMIGRATION TO THE U.S.

1901-      8,795,386
1910 {+}

1911-      5,735,811
1920

1921-      4,107,209
1930

1931-        528,431
1940

1941-      1,035,039
1950

1951-      2,515,479
1960

1961-      3,321,677
1970

1971-      4,493,314
1980

1981-      5,801,579
1989

   {+} Land arrivals not completely enumerated until 1908
Source: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service
CRAIN'S/KIMBERLY MART

CITY POPULATION FALLS AS IMMIGRANT NUMBERS INCREASE
Between 1970 and 1980, even as Chicago's total population fell 10.6%, its number
of foreign-born residents increased by 16.4%.

IMMIGRANTS, NATIVES COMPETE FOR SCARCE SCHOOL RESOURCES
Between the 1986-87 and the present school year, the Chicago Public Schools
budget for vocational education rose just 10%, to $ 80.3 million, while the
budget for bilingual education rose more than 50%, to $ 60 million.  Vocational
education spending fell to 3.3% of the total budget from 3.9%, while bilingual
education spending rose to 2.5% of the total budget from 2.1%.

LEGISLATION INCREASES VISAS FOR HIGHLY SKILLED IMMIGRANTS
As of Oct. 1, the Immigration Act of 1990 nearly tripled the number of visas
available to highly skilled or professional immigrants each year to 140,000 from
54,000.
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Sylvia D. D'Cruz                                
Mead Data Central                               Systems & Product Technology
Bldg. VI, 9595 Springboro Pike                          udcrusd@meaddata.com
Miamisburg, Ohio 45342                                        (513) 865-6800   
                                               
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