POSTED Sat., SEPT. 5th: The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report on Friday in advance of Labor Day weekend, and BLS reports that nonfarm employment increased modestly by 173,000 in the month of August. The number looks good, but it represents a 30% decrease in new jobs from the previous two months.
While the overall narrow (U-3) unemployment rate decreased from 5.2% to 5.1%, the number of Americans who left the labor force increased by 261,000, helping to account for the drop in the overall rate.
These numbers are consistent with recent analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies that looked at employment for the second quarter of 2015. CIS found that 17 million Americans want a full-time job, but can't find one. The report also found that Black and Hispanic native-born workers have broad (U-6) unemployment rates 75% and 50% worse, respectively, than native-born workers as a whole. The U-6 rate not only counts individuals who are unemployed and looking for work, but also counts those who have recently given up their job search or have settled for part-time work for economic reasons.
The CIS report also found that foreign-born workers with a high school degree or less are more likely to have a job than their native-born counterparts. Nearly 1 in 4 native-born workers between the ages of 18-29 can't find a full-time job, where the rate for foreign-born workers of the same age is 20% less. For all native-born workers over the age of 18 with less than a high school degree, they face a U-6 unemployment rate almost 60% higher than that of their foreign-born counterparts!
This Labor Day weekend, the nation will celebrate the contributions that workers have made for our country. But, at the same time, we should also examine how immigration policies set by Congress -- and in some cases, set unilaterally and against the will of Congress by the Obama Administration -- affect American workers.
Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, touched on that in a recent op-ed for the Daily Caller.
The data are clear. Employment prospects for young people, low-skilled workers, and African-Americans continue to be dismal. When the unemployment rate in a population is over 8 percent, as it is for all three groups, you don't have a shortage of labor -- you have a surplus. It is clear that illegal immigration, and low-skilled immigration generally, has a devastating effect on the jobs and wages of low-skilled Americans, particularly low-skilled African-Americans and young Americans.
--- U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow
We've posted new faxes to your Action Board so you can send these numbers to your three Members of Congress and urge them to reduce the impact that high levels of both legal and illegal immigration have on American workers.
CHRIS CHMIELENSKI is the Director of Content & Activism for NumbersUSA
