James C. Cooper's and Kathleen Madigan's analysis in ''Screwy labor statistics'' (Business Outlook, Jan. 25) ignores the impact of immigration on the labor supply. Since the 1994 devaluation of the peso in Mexico, illegal immigration has been surging, as evidenced by increased apprehensions of illegal aliens by the U.S. Border Patrol on our Southwest border. It now exceeds 1.5 million per year.

Many of those who don't get caught and who successfully make it to the job sites in Houston and other cities are supplying the labor for the recent unseasonable increase in construction activity without wage pressure on the economy. Some of this wage slowdown is coming from unscrupulous employers who hire such immigrants at low hourly rates without thorough document checks. This enables them to hire ''skilled'' construction workers out of Mexico and Central America, and many more to come from South America with the current Brazilian economic crisis deepening. Immigrants are also easily filling the many low-paid jobs in our rapidly expanding service sector with wages below the national average.

There is a lack of official data from the Labor Dept. on these phenomena. Many illegal immigrants are hidden in our informal economy, work for subcontractors, and are not counted when computing the employment numbers.

Alan R. Goozner
Statistics Intelligence Analyst
Immigration & Naturalization Service
Washington


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