Oh, great! Now we hear that American jobs are rapidly going to non-Americans.
How can this be?
U.S. government data shows that all of the net gain in employment over the last 13 years has gone to immigrants. And not all of them were legal immigrants. It includes illegals as well.
How could that be?
A review over 12 years, from Q1 2000 to the Q1 2013, the total of native American workers fell by almost 1.3 million. At the same time, the size of the working class, from age 16 to age 65, increased by more than 16.4 million.
What?
And if you also look over that period, using data from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the number of legal and illegal immigrants actually working rose by 5.3 million and the total number of working-age immigrants increased by 8.8 million.
Here is that the CIS says about it, “One of the main justifications for the large increase in permanent immigration and guest workers in the Schumer-Rubio bill is that the nation does not have enough workers. A second argument for the bill is that immigration always creates jobs for natives. But the last 13 years make it clear that large-scale immigration can go hand in hand with weak job growth and persistently high rates of joblessness among the native-born.”
“Immigrants” are defined by CIS as those who are not U.S. citizens at birth. It covers a range of people including naturalized citizens, temporary workers, Lawful Permanent Residents, foreign students, as well as illegal immigrants.
The Center’s analysis showed there was a decline in employment rates for working-age Americans who were born here. Americans of almost every age group have been impacted by this, from teenagers to those in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Prior to the recession in 2008, the economy was expanding – that is in mainly the Bush years, from 2000 to 2007. At that time 60 percent of the net increase in employment among those of working age went to immigrants. That was a lot, especially considering that they only accounted for 38 percent of the population growth among the working-age population.
Wow, that was a red flag right there, but did the government or media pick that up and tell us about it?
The CIS concludes that there is no shortage of workers that mean we need to bring in more people. They said, “The dramatic decline in work among natives, and the enormous increase in the number not working, even before the recession, is strong evidence that labor is not in short supply in the United States.”
That is quite a twist in the old American jobs debate and the need for more workers.
