2010's Summer Youth Employment Disaster: The Why
08/27/2010
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF
A bad summer for youth employment Kansascity.com reports:
The share of young people aged 16 to 24 who were employed this summer fell to 48.9 percent — the lowest rate on record since 1948.
Many were discouraged:
the proportion of the 16-24 age group that was working or looking for work also dropped this summer to its lowest percentage on record — 60.6 percent.
Nevertheless
About 4.4 million youth were actively searching for work and considered unemployed in July this year. That produced a youth unemployment rate of 19.1 percent, the highest rate on record for the month.
Yes, of course, the economy is bad, but so it has been before in the past 62 years!

What is hurting today’s young people hoping for summer work is that the labor market is swamped by an unprecedented quantity of unskilled immigrant labor, both illegal and legal. As Ed Rubenstein has documented, they are displacing American workers. And their negative effect on wage rates is directly discouraging job-seeking by native born youth

American workers desperately need an immigration moratorium and honest immigration law enforcement.

In a completely related development, the worthies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) announced today a new study From Bad to Worse: Unemployment and Underemployment Among Less-Educated U.S.-Born Workers, 2007 to 2010

This valuable if wonkish report takes 13 pages to document my assessment above (and apply it generally).

How pleasant it is to think of the dozens of Congressthings, and their hard-working staffs, who today immediately downloaded and printed the report to carry off for weekend reading at their summer retreats.

What is needed here is not more evidence. What is needed is Anger. In that respect last week’s contribution which I discussed in A Zinger from CIS!...At last was far more effective.

Print Friendly and PDF