Another 2.1 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, according to new data released by the Department of Labor earlier today. Last week's claims bring total unemployment claims over the last 10 weeks as a result of government shutdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic to 40.8 million.
A recent 2018 jobs report, released by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), shows that employment for all foreign workers in the U.S. increased by 3%, while employment for all American workers increased a little less than 1.5%. The data also shows a much higher growth rate of employment for foreign national men -- an increase of 2.7% -- compared to employment for American-born men -- a 1.7% increase.
An op-ed by Thomas Broadwater argues that blue-collar work visas "are boxing millions of minority citizens out of jobs."
Broadwater elaborates:
"The number of good-paying blue collar jobs is shrinking. Since 1980, America has lost more than 12 million manufacturing jobs to automation or offshoring. Wages have stagnated."
According to the Times, 161,000 new jobs created in October, and the unemployment rate dipping down to 4.9 percent, “suggest[s] a healthy outlook for the months ahead.” No, it suggests something much different. In effect, the unemployment rate went down in October because 425,000 people (in just one month!) were moved from the “unemployed” column to the “not in the labor force” column on a government spreadsheet. In 2000, the number of 18- to 64-year-olds not in the labor force was 38.1 million; today that number is 49 million.
Last week, House Speaker Paul Ryan launched the GOP’s plan to fight poverty and enable the upward mobility of Americans.
The American Action Forum, an organization closely aligned with the Republican National Committee, on May 5 released a “study” authored by Ben Gitis and Jacqueline Varas.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has released the job numbers for November 2015, and much of the media is repeating the Fed’s rote line that this is yet another “key indicator of economic strength,” and that maybe, just maybe, it is time to raise interest rates. Whether or not Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen decides to raise interest rates is an important topic to consider, but that discussion almost always neglects the plight of tens of millions of Americans.
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.
The Obama administration has issued almost 5.5 million more work permits than Congressionally set limits allow according to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). The report shows that, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) data obtained by a Freedom of Information request, from 2009-2014 the agency issued 5,461,568 new work permits to immigrants, beyond the 1.1 million legal immigrants and 700,000 guest workers admitted to the U.S. each year.
Washington Post -- Max Ehrenfreund
With another contentious debate about immigration approaching for the new Congress, it's worth remembering that immigration doesn't benefit everyone equally. Immigrants are better off when they can come here freely, of course, and so are most people already in the country, who benefit from immigrants' skills and labor.
The Atlantic -- David Frum
The job news is increasingly good: 321,000 jobs created in November. Yet the national economic mood remains grimly bleak.
Many Americans feel a sharp distinction between what’s said about “the” economy and what they experience in “their” economy. At the top of the income distribution, wages are rising. In the middle and bottom, wages stagnate. Jobs are created, yes—but native-born Americans are not hired for them.
The Daily Caller -- Neil Munro
President Obama once declared that an influx of illegal immigrants will harm “the wages of blue-collar Americans” and “put strains on an already overburdened safety net.”
A survey conducted by The Polling Company/WomanTrend of this year's midterm election voters found that overwhelming majorities want President Obama to work with Congress on immigration reform and feel that new jobs should go to American workers and legal immigrants already here.
According to the survey, 74% of Americans say that President Obama should work with Congress rather than around Congress on immigration reform. This includes majorities of men (75%), women (74%), whites (79%), blacks (59%), and Hispanics (54%).
While making a speech in Washington on Monday, U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez said that allowing an influx of foreign workers would boost wages and help the economy. This contrasts the findings of several studies.
Representing 1.5 million registered email activists and 2 million unique Facebook followers, NumbersUSA spent more than a million dollars in the three weeks running through Election Day putting this ad in front of citizens primarily in Senate battleground states through local broadcast TV and social media.
Canada's generous guest-worker program has often been held up by Big Business groups as a model for the United States to follow, but the Canadian government has announced plans to scale it back. The government is reducing the number of visas issued, the length of time that workers can stay in the country, and increasing the fees for businesses that wish to use the program. The changes have upset business groups in the country, but comes at the urging of the Canadian citizenry.
Eleven CEO's from some the nation's largest companies have signed on to a new letter to Congress urging passage of immigration reform that includes massive increases in low-skilled foreign workers.
Congress continues to issue over 1 million green cards and approximately 700,000 temporary guest worker visas a year. The Senate immigration bill and its House counterpart would double those numbers, a fact that tends to go unnoticed in the media. I often wonder if immigration reporters and their colleagues who cover employment and the economy read each other's stories.
The Denver public school is on track to hire as teachers illegal aliens who received a two-year stay of deportation and a work permit under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Critics say the move is unfair to unemployed citizens who are qualified educators.
Often the last two decades, we've had to hold our breath until late in the State of the Union address to find out what terrible immigration ideas that particular president wanted to foist on us. Pres. Obama mercifully let us know early on. And despite the fact that the news media has been making it seem like immigration is about 60% of Obama's agenda for this year, he gave it only a perfunctory paragraph.
The title of this blog was the choice of priorities that I offered Thursday in the studios of Fusion/Univision in Miami. While this giant ABC-owned network aimed at Hispanic audiences is almost consumed with aiding as many illegal aliens as possible, I tried to raise the idea of helping as many Hispanic Americans as possible.
Compared to the heavy-metal terror I used to feel listening to Pres. Bush's State of the Union immigratiion appeals, Pres. Obama's obligatory immigration section tonight was easy-listening music. The verses and chorus were nearly identical to last year's and just didn't sound like he had a thought in the world that any of it could happen. What really galled me, though, was his bragging about more than 3 million U.S. jobs created during the last 22 months while I knew that the Obama Administratino over that same period had given out more than 3 million work visas to immigrants and other foreign workers.
Illegal aliens finding it more and more difficult to live illegally in the United States because of increased enforcement and a sluggish economy are getting some help through a new foundation. Philanthropist Henry Buhl has established the Coalition to Protect American Workers that helps illegal aliens repatriate to their home countries, which in turn, opens up job opportunities for Americans.
Two years into the jobs recession, some reporters are still operating under the false assumption that immigration policy is determined by U.S. labor market conditions. According to The New York Times' coverage of a Brookings Institution report, “The flow of immigration has resumed, after….[having] stopped almost completely during the recession….The rise pointed to an increase in demand for immigrant labor in the economy, said Audrey Singer, a demographer and co-author of the report.”
The jobless rate inched up in November to 9.8% after settling at 9.6% for the past several months. The jobless rate for most vulnerable groups of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants all increased in November. If passed by Congress, the DREAM Act Amnesty would add up to 2.1 million individuals to the depressed job market and allow for them to sponsor their family members in later years.
On Labor Day, a top union leader asked voters to "call out" corporations that ship jobs overseas. But how is that any more harmful to U.S. workers than when unions lobby to bring more foreign workers into this country to take more U.S. jobs?
New jobless claims are again going up. I was asked by a reporter why I disagree with all the experts who say that immigration makes the economy bigger. My answer? "I agree that the economy will be bigger as you add immigrants, but what matters is what happens to individual Americans. And that effect for 25 years has been stagnant or declining real wages for the working-class occupations."
