These days, if you aren’t concerned about the American economy and future, then you aren’t paying attention. The decades of profligate abuse by elites upon the national engine of production have finally hit the wall.

The current jobs depression indicates that America’s once robust engine of prosperity is broken, largely because of outsourcing whole industries to cheap labor havens abroad and importing immigrant workers for those jobs that couldn’t be exported.

As a result, we no longer produce anything. There’s no there there. The American economy is missing millions of jobs that used to exist here.

Hotel magnate Donald Trump made that point recently when interviewed on Fox News, in reference to Washington’s unseemly deference to Red China.

Below is a simple calculation about how many jobs need to be created for the country to get back to a normal level of employment:

The Sobering Truth Behind Unemployment Numbers, Yahooo Finance, April 5, 2010

The post 2007 recession has eliminated 8.4 million jobs and rendered 15.7 million American’s jobless.

The mere fact that the palatable version of the unemployment rate has remained at 9.7% for three straight months, has Wall Street cheering.

Before chiming in, consider what it will take to simply get back to a normal unemployment rate of 5%. This is mindboggling.

The current labor force of 154 million will increase by about 1.8 million over each of the next five years because of ”newbies’ entering the job market. By 2014, the labor force will be around 163 million. A 5% U-3 (not U-6) unemployment rate would equate to 8.15 million workers without a job.

7.55 million jobs will have to be created to reduce the number of job-less workers from today’s 15.7 million to 8.15 million. To accomplish this, there would have to be 125,833 jobs created each and every month over the next five years with no jobs lost.

The average monthly job growth over the past 10 years has been about 50,000. The average monthly job growth over the past 20 years has been about 90,000. Keep in mind that the 1990 — 2010 timeframe hosted the biggest bull market and economic expansion in history. Do you see a 1990s and early 2000s bull market around you?

Such a bleak employment outlook extending years into the future is an excellent argument for an immigration moratorium.