The latest example of media bias: Even after another month of strong hiring in June and a sinking unemployment rate, the U.S. job market just isn’t what it used to be. Pay is sluggish. Many part-timers can’t find full-time work. And a diminished share of Americans either have a job or are looking for one. Yet in the face of global and demographic shifts, this may be what a nearly healthy U.S. job market now looks like. – Associated Press posted by Breitbart News 7/4/15
Fact Check: With pay sluggish and full-time jobs often hard to get, it’s hard to see how what we have is a healthy U.S. job market by any definition of the term. Nevertheless, that is only a small criticism of this article. In the main, it offers a pretty good analysis of what going on in the economy. The problem is what it leaves out. It makes no mention of immigration as it describes our problems of wage depression, unemployment, and underemployment. This is a serious omission because immigration is a major reason for these problems.
As a recent study by the Center for Immigration Studies notes, 17 million legal and illegal immigrants have entered the U.S. since the year 2000, and they have taken jobs at a much higher rate than native-born Americans. To illustrate, from the first quarter of 2000 to the first quarter of 2014, jobs held by immigrants of working-age (16-65) have increased by 5.7 million, while jobs held by the native-born of working age decreased by 127,000. This has happened even as native-born Americans of working age (16-65) accounted for two-thirds of the growth of the workforce.
Currently, 58 million native-born Americans of working age are not working, and many of them—who have given up looking for work for an extended period of time—are not counted in the official figure of unemployment. As the CIS study concludes, all these figures indicate that immigration is having a negative impact on the job prospects of Americans born in this country. And immigration also offers at least a partial explanation as to why the average wage level in this country has stagnated. By the economic law of supply and demand, when all other factors are equal, more workers competing for jobs means lower wages.
Particularly hard-hit by immigration are Americans who are already low-income and economically disadvantaged in terms of education and skills. Conversely, people at the higher end of society often profit from immigration. In effect, immigration plays the role of Robin Hood in reverse, by taking from the American poor to give to the American rich.
A recent study by Professor Eric Gould of Hebrew University shines a spotlight on this inequity. He cites the decline of manufacturing and immigration as the sources of the growing income gap between haves and have-nots in the U.S. Gould observes, “[T]he last four decades have witnessed a dramatic change in the wage and employment structure in the United States and many other developed countries. The wage gap between earners at the top versus the bottom of the distribution have widened. . . . This paper establishes an important link between inequality in all sectors and the general equilibrium of manufacturing decline and an influx of less-skilled immigration.”
The media, acting too often as the mouthpieces of wealthy interests, don’t want Americans to catch the connection between mass immigration and their economic distress. They’re hoping we just won’t notice.