As a result of job competition with legal and illegal immigrants, the little educated and younger Americans, especially those who are disadvantaged minorities, are hurt by having lower wages and benefits and fewer job opportunities than would otherwise be available to them. Our lowest paying jobs in businesses such as restaurants or motels are very appealing to immigrants who find the pay is six to ten times what they could earn in their home countries if they were able to find any employment there at all. Thus the immigrants will do whatever it takes, including doing more work for less compensation and working “off the books” in order to obtain low paying American jobs. As a consequence, in all too many cases employers choose to hire immigrants instead of native Americans. (For more advantages stemming from off the books work see blog of August 9 -- "Illegal Immigration Results in Understatement of U.S. Employment.")
Using data from the June 2009 Current Population Survey, Karen Jensenius and Steven A. Camarota have compiled unemployment and underemployment data for different subsets of native-born Americans who are most likely to be competing with immigrants for jobs(see Center for Immigration Studies piece entitled “Worse Then It Seems,” Backgrounder/Report August 2009 which can be found at their website www.cis.org).
The data show that for June 2009 the unemployment rate for all native-born Americans is 9.7 percent. By comparison, the unemployment rate for native-born Americans with less than a high school education is 20.8 percent. For native-born blacks with less than a high school education, the unemployment rate rises to 27.5 per cent.
For all young (18-29) native-born who have only a high school education, the unemployment rate is 18.5 percent. For all young native-born blacks with only a high school education the unemployment rate is 25.8 percent.
These data become much worse if one includes 1) the underemployed (those working part time who would like to work full time) and 2) those too discouraged to have sought employment in the prior four weeks (none of whom are counted as unemployed in the official statistics). Adding these two categories to the unemployment rate gives percentages of 16.3 percent for all native born and 33.2 percent for all native born with less than a high school education. Similarly, the rate rises to 42 percent for native-born blacks who did not graduate from high school. For the young (18-29) who have only a high school education, the percentage rises to 30.3 percent for all native-born and 37.4 percent for native-born blacks.
Conclusions from the Jensenius and Camarota report: “The [unemployment] situation is particularly bad for minorities, the young, and less-educated Americans. These are the workers who face the most competition from immigrants – legal and illegal.” “…there is no shortage of less-educated [citizen] workers in this country. If the United States were to enforce immigration laws and encourage illegal immigrants to return to their home countries over time, we have an adequate supply of less-educated natives to replace these workers.”
