jobs away from poor Americans sullies this thread by well intentioned "liberals" allow me to post this data
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A superficial reading of the data in these papers might suggest that rising immigration in the past four years has been a key factor in accounting for the poor labor market performance of native-born Americans during this period. But such a reading would be highly inaccurate. The employment outcomes of native-born Americans mostly reflect the underlying weakness of the U.S. labor market, rather than large displacements by new immigrants.
* Net immigration has remained fairly constant between the 1990s and the post-2000 period; instead, what has changed is the rate of job growth in the U.S. economy.
During the 1990s, 13 million immigrants arrived in the United States—an average of about 1.3 million per year (Capps et al. 2004). Since 2000, that rate of immigration has remained largely unchanged (Sum et al. 2004, table 1). The total share of immigrants in the population has risen only from 11 to 12 percent during the past four years.
In contrast, the rate of net job growth in the United States has collapsed between the late 1990s and the period since 2001. Between March 1995 and March 2000, our economy generated nearly 15 million new nonfarm payroll jobs and increased employment by about 13 million.1 But, after a period of modest job growth between March 2000 and 2001 (with payroll and employment increases of about 1 million each), the economy went through a short recession followed by a relatively "jobless" recovery for three years. Between March 2001 and 2004, total employment grew by just over one-half million, while the number of nonfarm payroll jobs declined by about 1.7 million. At the same time, the U.S. population grew by about 8 million. In the past year, job growth has picked up somewhat, though the labor market remains quite weak.2
* Contrary to the interpretations suggested by Camarota (2004) and Sum et al. (2004), immigration cannot possibly account for many of the labor market developments that have occurred since 2000.
In the 1990s, strong immigration coexisted with very low unemployment rates, and record-high percentages of the population were employed. Indeed, immigration helped to relieve the pressure of very tight labor markets on employers, who had difficulty finding enough native-born workers able and willing to fill the jobs they were offering. Yet the same rate of immigration today coexists with a sluggish labor market, in which an additional 5 million jobs would be needed to re-create the employment rates of the late 1990s and 2000.3
The papers by Camarota and Sum et al. clearly show that, in the aggregate, employment among new immigrants has increased while that of native-born Americans has declined since 2000. But a look at some more disaggregated data suggests a far more complex story. While new immigrant employment has been relatively concentrated in a small number of sectors (such as building and grounds maintenance, food preparation, and construction), the shifts in jobs across other sectors of the U.S. economy have been much greater.
For example, the number of payroll jobs in manufacturing declined by about 3 million between March 2000 and March 2004; new immigrant employment rose, but only by 335,000 in this sector (Sum et al. 2004). The number of payroll jobs in the public sector rose in this period by 850,000; almost none of these jobs went to new immigrants. Strong job growth has occurred in diverse services such as health care and professional services, while employment growth has slowed or declined elsewhere (such as in retail trade), in patterns almost completely unrelated to immigration.
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