C.I.Most immigrants take jobs at the bottom of the ladder, jobs which many natives won't seek because they are considered too hard, pay too little, or have lost status, Papademetriou notes.
And the people they do displace often have little political clout. Sum sees immigrants as one factor behind today's historical low employment rate among US teenagers. Barely more than a third hold jobs. Over the past four years, the number of employed teens has declined by nearly 1.3 million.
Teens used to take many of the entry level jobs offered by restaurants, retail stores, landscaping companies, factories, and other businesses. Now more teens are going to college, and many may not want or need to work. But a new study by Sum and his colleagues at Northeastern finds that 2.5 million teens last year were unemployed, underemployed, or had stopped looking for work in the past month. They faced severe competition for jobs from young adults, older women, and immigrants - most of whom are young.
That lack of employment has social implications. The study notes that youths who work more during their high school years have an easier time transitioning to the labor market upon high school graduation, especially those not going on to college. Jobless teenage women are more likely to get pregnant, and economically disadvantaged boys and girls are more likely to drop out of school if jobless.
In occupational fields with many immigrants, native-born workers tend to have higher jobless rates. The four occupations with the largest number of newly arrived immigrants (1.4 million in construction, food preparation, cleaning and maintenance, and production workers) employ 21.4 million natives, and have more than 2 million unemployed natives.
What employers really want in many cases by hiring immigrants is to hold down wage costs, experts say.
So remove the illegal immirgrants and that should solve most of the problem. People would need to hire citizens for the jobs and because of this, the wages would go up.
When was the last increase? 1995? With Bush in office, and our representatives now having addressed the issue for Bush's second term, it will be at least 2010 before it comes up again. Can anyone here imagine living on 1995 minimum wage in 2010?
With oil going up, health insurance now unaffordable for record numbers of citizens, housing costs rising, and cuts being made to government assistance programs... I'm looking for the next 4 years to produce record numbers of homeless and poor.
I've noticed that trend of high school student's decline in jobs for many years, and wondered about the unforseen impact to their futures. As for employer's choice to hire immigrants over citizens, that been going on for many decades. The problem increased as more illegals came over the border from Mexico and elsewhere. Our government fails in many ways; they just don't take the time to correct them.
Many states are also now considering giving illegals driver's licenses. Ya just can't win no matter how hard we cry.
The government is dominated and controlled by business. Their only interest is the bottom line. As long as they can keep getting cheap labor immigration, legal and illegal will continue unabated.
Don't you love the way our government sacrifices our own for the sake of "business?"
