June 07, 2015

Jobs report for May

You've probably heard the great news: the emperor's Labor Department reported that the U.S. economy added 280,000 jobs last month!  Hey, wow!  The economy is booming!  Yay, emperor!

This fabulous news overshadowed another bit of data from the same labor department:
The number of foreign-born individuals holding jobs in the United States increased by 279,000 to 25,098,000 in May, according to data released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

In January 2009, when President Obama took office, there were 21,375,000 foreign-born workers employed in the United States. Since then, the number has increased by 3,723,000.
Wait...280,000 jobs added last month, and the number of foreign-born job-holders increased by 279,000 ?

Now, the BLS takes pains to point out that its numbers for "foreign-born" don't distinguish between legal and illegals.  So no one is remotely claiming that 279,000 jobs last month were grabbed by illegals.  But that doesn't change the fact that the net number of new jobs filled by American-born workers seems to have only increased by...1,000.

But no matter, citizen:  The economy is booming!  Happy days are here again!  Oh, and if you were one of the thousands of Americans working for Disney who just got replaced by imported "guest workers"--and then were required to train the workers who replaced you--the emperor says go to the end of that big line over there to apply for unemployment.  And if you lose your house in the meantime, don't worry, because Obama!

Oh, one more tiny tidbit: For native-born workers the unemployment rate increased to 5.4 percent in May from  5.1 percent in April.  You did see that in all the headlines, right?  I mean, if unemployment increased by three-tenths of a percent when Bush was president it would have been the lede story in every paper in the country.  So you did see this story, right?

No?  Not even on page ten?  Why, I'm...shocked...

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