Two Immigrants For Every New Job Since 2000
10:55 PM 02/10/2015
Neil Munro
The United States has accepted two new immigrants for each additional job created since 2000, according to federal data.
The data shows that 18 million legal and illegal immigrants settled in the United States from 2000 to 2015, while only 9.3 million additional jobs were created, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors a reduced level of immigration.
After subtracting deaths, departures and retirements among the immigrants, the working-age population of immigrants grew 12 million since 2000, according to data at the Bureau of Labor Standards, said Steve Camarota, the author of the CIS study.
The working-age population of Americans aged 16 to 65 also grew by 16 million, Camarota told The Daily Caller. That’s a combined working-age population increase of 28 million, which is three times the number of jobs added since 2000.
The huge growth in labor, and the slow growth of employment, debunks predictions by Democrats and business groups that immigrant labor spurs the economy enough to ensure that even Americans gain from the inflow.
Instead, the post-2000 flood of migrants and young Americans workers has swamped the slow-growing labor market, and is helping to drive down salaries and to boost values on Wall Street. “Median household income, on average, has fallen 9 percent since the turn of the century,” The New York Times reported in January, matching conventional economic predictions about supply and demand in the labor market.
The extra immigrants are mostly poor, drive up taxpayers’ costs for welfare spending and are crowding into classrooms and spiking state and local education budgets.
The public is increasingly hostile to extra immigration, even as respondents tell pollsters that they value the American tradition of immigration and also that they respect immigrants. The contrast between public statements and private voting was demonstrated in the Democratic stronghold of Oregon, where Americans voted in November by two-to-one to deny drivers licenses to illegals. A January 2015 Gallup poll showed that only seven percent of Americans want a higher rate of immigration, despite minimal media coverage about the scale of immigration.
One reason for the low support for additional immigration is migrants’ willingness to take jobs at lower pay than Americans. In part, they take lower wages because their pay will be effectively increased by the government’s subsequent award of citizenship to them. That’s a hugely valuable deferred payment to migrants, their children and their retirement-age parents.
American citizens, however, can’t get citizenship as deferred wages. Instead, they must ask employers to pay their full wages — except for welfare payments — which puts them at a disadvantage in the labor market.
The percentage of working-age, native-born Americans who are in the labor market has fallen from 76.0 percent in 2000 down to 71.5 percent in 2014, according to the CIS report. The trend has pushed 13 million additional Americans out of the workforce since 2000.
In November 2014, one in every five U.S. jobs was held by a foreign-born worker, up from one-in-six jobs in January 2010, according to federal data highlighted by the Center for Immigration Studies.
The resulting poverty and social conflict in the United States has spiked demand for big government aid programs since 2000. That demand helped Sen. Barack Obama claim the presidency in 2008 and 2012.
But Obama and his allied Democrats have accelerated the process.
During Obama’s tenure, the normal immigrant inflow of 1 million per year has been boosted by the unprecedented distribution of roughly 7.4 million work-permits to illegals, refugees, tourists and other categories of foreigners.
That 7.4 million is in addition to the roughly four million working-age immigrants among the 6 million legal immigrants who have arrived since 2009.
The combination of the 4 million and the 7.4 million has added roughly 11.4 million new foreign workers to the labor market since Obama was inaugurated in January 2009.
During the same period, roughly 26 million young Americans joined the workforce in search of the jobs needed to pay off college debts, to buy houses and to start families.
That means roughly one working-age immigrant has entered the labor market for every two or three young Americans who turn 18 during Obama’s six-year tenure.
Obama announced in November that he would distribute another 4 million work-permits to illegals now living in the United States. The work-permits will allow the illegals to compete for better-paying jobs now being sought by poorly paid Americans and legal immigrants.
Obama has suggested that Americans don’t have the right to block immigration. “There have been periods where the folks who were already here suddenly say, ‘Well, I don’t want those folks,’ even though the only people who have the right to say that are some Native Americans,” Obama said in a November speech in Chicago.
Obama also believes that greater immigration will boost progressives’ political power. “People are getting more and more comfortable with the diversity of this country, much more sophisticated about both the cultural differences but more importantly, the basic commonality that we have,” he said Jan. 23.
Most of Obama’s migrants have found work in the food sector or in other blue-collar jobs. However, a growing number of immigrants and guest-workers are winning professional-grade jobs.
The GOP is divided over immigration.
GOP voters are overwhelmingly opposed to Obama’s efforts to increase the labor supply.
But several top GOP leaders have said they want to pass bills that would import hundreds of thousands of lower-wage workers for food-sector jobs, for blue-collar jobs and for jobs sought by young U.S. professionals, such as therapists, teachers, accountants and pharmacists.
The swing-voters needed to win in 2016 are strongly opposed to greater immigration, especially when pollsters ask them about the link between immigration and corporate hiring.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/10/tw...ob-since-2000/
