Unemployed in The U.S.

The Chamber of Commerce crowd and its liberal immigrant-advocate buddies just don’t get it.

Unemployment has risen to 6.4 percent, the highest unemployment rate in nine years. Businesses cut 30,000 jobs in June alone, mostly in factories.

America’s manufacturing sector lost 95,000 jobs in April. Forty-eight thousand other jobs disappeared the same month.

The combined elimination of American jobs in February and March was 477,000.

Almost half a million people each week file new claims for unemployment benefits.

The average workweek has fallen to 34 hours. That means American wage earners’ paychecks have shrunk.

Today, more than 18 million Americans can’t find full-time employment.

We have nine million officially unemployed individuals who each week seek jobs and find nothing. About two million of those have been out of work for more than half a year.

Another four million have dropped out of the labor force. They couldn’t find work, so they stopped looking. They aren’t reflected in the official unemployment rate.

About five million are working part-time because they couldn’t find full-time jobs.

Unemployed Americans hurt worst have no more than a high-school education.

All this bleak economic news means that, on average, more than 41,000 people in each congressional district can’t find full-time work.

Between the layoffs, unemployment, and underemployment that have characterized the American labor market the past few years, one would think that this would be among the worst possible times to import more foreign workers.

But the unpatriotic business lobby and its strange bedfellows of anti-Americanism keep pushing their Faustian bargain: a mass amnesty of illegal aliens that’s dressed up as a “foreign guestworker” program.

Washington-based agriculture lobbyists are pushing as “urgent priorities” “adjustment of status” (a euphemism for legalizing illegal aliens) and foreign agricultural guestworkers. For instance, the National Council of Agricultural Employers wants Congress to “allow experienced farm workers who are out of status an opportunity to become documented.”

Amnesty has numerous problems. Mainly, any amnesty rewards lawbreakers for their lawbreaking. And amnesty always results in encouraging more illegal immigration.

Another problem is that amnesty of illegal aliens feeds chain migration. Chain migration occurs when the initial immigrant brings additional relatives beyond his nuclear family of spouse and minor children. Under the current immigration system, you end up with one person’s immigration resulting in 20-30 distant family members coming to America on no other basis than having a relative here.

Chain migration causes the long separation of spouses from one another and small children from having both parents to raise them. It’s fundamentally unfair to split apart close family members in the name of “family reunification.” It’s all the more galling to prolong this separation by rewarding lawbreakers.

We already have nine million illegal aliens in America. Every year, we admit more than one million legal immigrants, while another one million illegal immigrants push their way in. Most come as chain immigrants, lacking education and job skills.

Plus, we admit thousands more temporary foreign workers each year. Many of these “adjust status” to immigrant categories and start their own family chains.

Thus, there are literally millions of foreigners coming to America, adding to our labor pools. Flooding the labor market with cheap foreign labor, especially of the unskilled variety, does the same thing as flooding any market with an excess of a product or service: It drives down prices.

That may sound good at first, but in the labor market, mass immigration speeds up a deadly spiral of wage depression. And it depresses wages on up the sectors.

If you legalize today’s illegal agricultural workers, after they get their amnesty they’ll climb the “career ladder” of the unskilled to, say, driving a cab or working at a convenience store. Those currently working in other low-skilled sectors experience greater and greater wage pressure, as more workers in that market compete for the same or fewer jobs.

This wage depression and job displacement are already happening, because of cheap foreign labor, across U.S. job sectors. News reports such as one March 10 in the Washington Post illustrate the perverse consequences of mass immigration.

Under the headline, “Feeble Economy, Tighter Borders Don’t Stem Immigrant Tide,” the Post reported that those new arrivals “are finding jobs.” “The number of employed immigrants rose by 593,000 from 2000 through the end of last year, while the number of U.S.-born workers declined by 1.5 million, said a new report by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.”

In contrast to unscrupulous businesses’ Washington mouthpieces, America’s Main Street small businesses don’t want a guestworker program and oppose amnesty. The National Federation of Independent Business finds in member surveys that small business owners by nearly 3-to-1 oppose “temporary guest worker programs to ease worker shortages.” And only 16 percent of business owners actually favor “amnesty to illegal immigrants who have worked in this country for a specified number of years” that business lobbyists in Washington are pushing.

Congressmen should pay more attention to businesses in their own districts and especially to the interests of their 41,000 unemployed or underemployed constituents instead of harming their employment prospects by rewarding foreign lawbreakers.

— James R. Edwards Jr. is coauthor of The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform and an adjunct fellow with the Hudson Institute.