New jobs report
... the really bad employment news last month wasn’t in the headline numbers, but in the “other” employment survey, of households rather than businesses.
Household survey employment fell by 316,000 in April – the largest monthly job bleed since a whopping 445,000 loss in June 2011. April was also one of those rare months when immigrants bore the entire brunt of a job decline:
In April:
- Total Household Survey employment fell by 316,000, down by 0.2%
- Native-born American employment rose by 76,000, up by 0.1%
- Foreign-born immigrant employment fell by 392,000, down by 1.5%
Immigrants lost 392,000 positions in April, their largest monthly decline since they gave back 681,000 in December 2009. Not that native-born Americans did that well: a 76,000 job gain for a group that accounts for 6,276,000 of the country’s unemployed is pathetic.
The bottom line: the long term trend of immigrants displacing natives in the labor force is intact...
During the Obama years immigrant employment has risen 4.3 times faster than American employment – 17.6% versus 4.1%. In many unskilled occupations the job growth gap is far larger, owing to the disproportionate number of foreign-born workers...