After a Long Climb, Foreign-Born Labor Declines

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/for-first-time-in-over-a-decade-foreign-born-labor-falls/?hp

March 26, 2009, 7:55 pm
After a Long Climb, Foreign-Born Labor Declines
By Catherine Rampell

Casey Mulligan’s recent posts extolling the virtues of bringing more foreign-born workers into the United States drew some angry responses. A number of readers wrote to argue that foreign-born workers should quit taking Americans’ jobs, or something to that effect. Well, these readers may get their wish.

Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with its annual report on foreign-born workers in the American work force. It showed that, after more than a decade of steady growth, the portion of employed workers who were foreign-born fell slightly in 2008.

Here’s a chart showing both the percentage of the United States population that is foreign-born, and the percentage of those employed in the United States who were born abroad (data courtesy of Steve Hipple, an economist at the B.L.S.). You’ll see that while the employed who were foreign-born fell by 0.1 percentage point, the percent of the American population that is foreign-born was flat:


Source: Steve Hipple, Bureau of Labor Statistics After more than a decade of steady growth, the percentage of the labor force that is foreign-born fell in 2008.

The historical data also show some other interesting trends.

From 1996 (the first year for which these numbers are available) to 2003, for example, the foreign-born had a higher unemployment rate than the native-born. In 2004, the trends began to flip, and for the next several years the native-born had higher unemployment rates. In 2008, though, both suffered equally, with unemployment rates of 5.8 percent.


Source: Steve Hipple, Bureau of Labor Statistics Trends in unemployment rates among the foreign-born and native-born.