VDARE.com: 05/11/10 – National Data: April American Worker Displacement: Is An "Arizona Effect" Showing Up?
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May 11, 2010
April American Worker Displacement: Is An “Arizona Effect” Showing Up?
U.S.
nonfarm payrolls added 290,000 workers in April, the
biggest increase since March 2006, with broad gains
throughout the economy, Bureau of Labor Statistics data
showed Friday. (See the full report:
PDF) The Household Survey found an even more robust
job surge, with 550,000 new positions reported for the
month.
The
Household Survey is particularly revealing because:
-
it canvasses people rather than
just large employers, and -
it notes the respondent’s race
and ethnicity.
People who work for small
businesses,
“off the books” or are self employed will show up in the
Household Survey. That includes many illegal aliens.
April 2010 marked the second
consecutive month in which
Hispanic employment—our proxy for foreign-born
workers, because about
40% of them are
immigrants—barely budged.
Here is the
action for the month:
-
Total employment:
+550,000 (+0.40 percent) -
Hispanic employment:
+2,000 (+0.01 percent) -
Non-Hispanic employment:
+548,000 (+0.46 percent)
Accordingly, the
VDARE.COM American Worker Displacement Index (VDAWDI)
fell by 0.3 percent to 125.3.:
The recession has undoubtedly
reduced the number of illegal aliens working in the U.S.
But the last two months are unique. In both March and
April healthy expansions of
non-Hispanic employment were accompanied by near
zero growth in Hispanic jobs. Not since late 2007 has
VDAWDI declined for two consecutive months.
Since we invented it in 2001, of course, VDAWDI has
ratcheted up to a record high of 126.1 in
February—showing that Hispanics (= immigrants)
decisively outpaced American workers in the race for
jobs over the decade.
Could the recent hiatus in Hispanic employment growth be
related to restrictionist legislation?
Obviously, the Arizona law, passed on April 20th,
could not have moved the needle much. Not directly,
anyway. But the mere prospect of such legislation could
well have had such an effect. And not just in Arizona:
at least
seven other states, and a handful of
municipalities, have been
considering stricter immigration laws.
Oklahoma and
Georgia have actually passed them, mysteriously
without the world coming to an end.
Arizona was
merely the
first to get the
national Main Stream Media’s attention.
A reduction in
the illegal alien population could well explain the
divergence in foreign and U.S.-born population trends
over the past year:
The working age
immigrant population was 43,000 lower in April 2010 than
April 2009—a reduction of 0.1%. This is the first such
decline since BLS started reporting foreign-born
employment in January.
The
year-over-year numbers also show American Worker
Displacement to be very much alive. The number of
immigrants working in the
U.S.
grew by 66,000 in the 12 months ending April 2010.
Native born employment shrunk by 1.349 million, or 1.1%,
over the same period.
Native
unemployment (9.6% in April) was considerably above that
of the foreign-born (8.8%). The gap between the two
rates expanded from 0.3 to 0.8 percentage points over
the past year.
(Number junkies
take note: these are seasonally unadjusted unemployment
rates, and as such are not directly comparable to the
9.9% unemployment rate reported by BLS on Friday.)
Edwin S. Rubenstein (email
him) is President of
ESR Research Economic Consultants in Indianapolis.