The report by my colleagues Steve Camarota and Karen Zeigler that Ryan reports on below builds on their earlier research showing immigrants capturing all recent job growth. (Here is a more detailed report breaking down people by age groups, education, etc. And they did a series of state-specific reports as well, on Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia.)
The main thing that’s different about this latest report is that you can just get the numbers yourself from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ public web site (specifically, Table A-7, “Employment status of the civilian population by nativity and sex, not seasonally adjusted [Numbers in thousands])”.
In other words, you don’t have to take our word for it, you don’t have to download a dataset, you don’t need number-crunching skills – you just have to be able to read a simple table. Check the boxes for “Employed” in both foreign-born and native-born, click “Retrieve data”, and look at the column for November; you’ll see that there were about 1.5 million fewer native-born Americans working last month than in November of 2007, but about 2 million more immigrants, even though the native-born accounted for the large majority of growth in the working-age population.
The point is not that the immigrants who are displacing American workers are doing anything wrong. While some are certainly illegal aliens, most are legal immigrants admitted by the system that Congress has set up. That’s the problem — too much immigration, most of it legal. And into this situation, the president, congressional Democrats, and too many of their Republican colleagues (including most of those who are likely to seek the presidential nomination) want to increase immigration and “temporary” worker programs even further. Voters might ask them why.