High Immigration Root Cause of Long-Term Unemployment

By Joe Guzzardi
November 22, 2013

Decades of sustained, high legal and illegal immigration, millions of outsourced jobs, millions more non-immigrant but employment-authorized visas issued to foreign-born workers has finally resulted in the inevitable. Because the federal government’s autopilot immigration policy has added 14 million to the labor pool from 2000-2010, 4.3 million displaced American workers now struggle with long-term unemployment.

Some economists point to the small, gradual and manipulated decline in the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rate to 7.3 percent as reason for encouragement. But statistics also indicate that long-term joblessness has increased 213 percent since 2007. Nearly 37 percent of all unemployed have been without a job for 27 weeks or more, the time period formally defined as long-term. Their family incomes have plunged more than 40 percent.

While millions sink into despair over their slim prospects, economists are locked in a meaningless, academic debate about whether the nation is in a “structural” or “cyclical” slump. Structural represents a market condition when a prospective employee doesn’t have the skills an employer is looking for; cyclical is a function of a weak economy. Not surprisingly, the government insists that unemployment, both long and short-term, is cyclical.  Former Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke spoke optimistically before he left office last summer. Bernanke predicted that 5 percent unemployment is within reach. Since the BLS excludes people too discouraged to look for work as part of its unemployment rate calculations, Bernanke could turn out to be right.

The long-term unemployed face a host of challenges which could exclude them from being hired. Employers may consider them too old, over-talented, or over-educated but with outdated skills. Candidates may speak English only; Spanish is an increasingly desirable commodity in states with high immigration. Often, however, the biggest hurdle is their existing long-term unemployed status.

Gregory Acs, director of the Urban Institute's Income and Benefits Policy Center says that there’s “aversion” in the market place to hiring which creates persistent problems as the unemployed become “estranged” from the working world.

High immigration isn’t the only culprit. Corporate America is a leading player, too. Standard practice in today’s bottom-line driven organizations is to replace middle-income earners with lower paid employees. Shamelessly greedy companies like McDonalds earn billions but pay its employees poverty level wages. In the meantime, McDonalds lobbies Capitol Hill for more foreign workers, as if Americans whose unemployment insurance have run out wouldn’t flip burgers.

America’s chronic unemployment was years in the making and won’t go away overnight. A spate of well-intended programs like Platform to Employment featured a week ago on 60 Minutes can only be successful when there are positions to fill. Regardless of what Bernanke and like-mined economists say, more jobs that pay middle class salaries aren’t on the horizon.

The simplest solution which, if Congress were to agree, might be reached faster than a new factory could be built: return America to its historic immigration levels. Before the 1965 Immigration Act, average annual immigration was 250,000; in 2012, it was more than 1 million. Although adjusting immigration totals may be the simplest and most effective road to restore America to full employment, it’s also the most politically incorrect and therefore the most improbable. 

Joe Guzzardi is a Californians for Population Stabilization Senior Writing Fellow whose columns have been syndicated since 1987. Contact him at [email protected]