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Professor studies the effects of Mexican immigrants on South Carolina's economy

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Low-cost, high-productivity workers from Mexico are becoming the new face of South Carolina’s labor force as more industries in the state seek to hire them, according to research findings released Wednesday (Feb. 22) by a University of South Carolina economist.

Dr. Douglas P. Woodward, economics professor and research director at the Moore School of Business, and a team of international business graduate students in the Moore School interviewed 381 Mexican immigrants from all regions of the state during 2005. Their findings represent the first phase in an ongoing effort by Woodward to understand more fully this exploding segment of the employment base, which has not been tracked.

“The state of South Carolina, not unlike other states, is surprisingly ignorant about Latino labor in general, even though it is a highly visible phenomenon,” Woodward said.

Of the immigrants interviewed, 79 percent were male, with an average age of 33. The team’s other findings include:

• About one-third of the interviewees worked in the construction industry. The rest were spread across landscaping, manufacturing, restaurants, trade and other industries.
• The average Mexican immigrant surveyed earned approximately $21,000 annually.
• 86.5 percent of the immigrants say they rent lodgings, with 78.3 saying they live in an apartment or mobile home.
• The highest percent of respondents came from the state of Veracruz, followed by Guerrero and Hidalgo in Central Mexico.
• Approximately 34 percent of the respondents claimed that they planned to remain in South Carolina, while some 61 percent said that they plan to return to Mexico.
• 58 percent reported having minors living with them.
• Mexican workers in South Carolina send on average 16 percent of their earnings back to their home communities in Mexico, which increasingly depend on this source of income.

South Carolina is a relatively new immigrant-receiving area, said Woodward. They are pulled here by jobs and the opportunity for a better life.

“We are developing informal sister-state economic relationships with communities south of the border,” Woodward said.

Woodward said the implications for the growing Mexican population in South Carolina are “both promising and disquieting.”

"On the promising side, growth creates income and buying power," Woodward said. "Immigrant labor also provides workers for numerous industries, particularly construction, business services (including restaurants) and manufacturing. The disquieting implications are that immigrant workers may displace and lower the wages of existing workers in the state."

In addition, Woodward said, “immigrant labor does not create jobs and income that can be tracked accurately.”

“It can be assumed that significant economic benefits go to private-sector U.S. employers in the form of higher profits,” Woodward said. “Yet it is not clear what the long-term implications may be. Education and other costs will be borne by the public sector if the new workers choose to stay and assimilate their families into southern society.”

Woodward said South Carolina must continue to monitor and assess the growing Latino immigrant population and devise appropriate public policies that will help all residents of the state prosper.

The findings are part of a larger research program under way at USC coordinated by the Consortium for Latino Immigration Studies. This part of the research was supported by students from the International Master of Business Administration Progam, the Center for International Business Research and Education (CIBER) program at the Moore School and the USC Research and Productive Scholarship program.

Full report is available online in the Division of Research.