News Americas, WASHINGTON, D.C., Fri. July 15, 2011: Immigrant workers from the Americas who live in the U.S. are largely from Mexico.
That’s according to the first International Migration In The Americas Report from the Organization of American States.
The report’s authors found that of the emigrant workers from the Americas in the United States and Europe, 45 percent are from Mexico. The Caribbean and the Andean Region accounted for close to 15 percent while the rest of Central America stood at 12 percent. The southern Cone of South America was put at 8 percent.
According to research, between 80 and 90 percent of expatriate workers from most Caribbean countries were concentrated in the U.S. while the percentage was even higher for emigrants from Central America and reached fully 99 percent for Mexico.
Emigrant workers from South American countries, on the other hand, were found more often in Europe, with about three quarters or more of those from Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Uruguay living and working in Europe.
Of the emigrant labor force born in Latin America and the Caribbean, men compose 60 percent of the total.
In most Caribbean countries, women predominate in the emigrant work force, the exceptions being Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba and Grenada. Conversely, men are in the majority in all Central American countries except Belize and Panama. The emigrant work force from South America tends to be more evenly balanced between men and women.
For over half of the countries in the Americas, the number of expatriates with a tertiary qualification in the labor force of their countries of residence exceeds that of those with less than upper secondary education, for both men and women in 2008-2009. This is especially the case for women expatriate workers from the Caribbean, forty percent or more of whom have a tertiary qualification for most countries of this region. Only for expatriates from Panama, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Canada and the United States among other countries does one see emigrant workers with this high level of qualification.
By contrast, relatively few expatriate workers from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Bolivia and Ecuador have tertiary qualifications. These have constituted the bulk of migration for lesser skilled jobs in the United States for the first four countries and in Spain for the latter two.
