No Labor Shortage: 11.5M Unemployed Americans Still Want Full-Time Jobs

Despite claims by the big business lobby and corporate interests that there are labor shortages in blue-collar and white-collar workforces, the latest federal data reveal that about 11.5 million unemployed and underemployed Americans want full-time jobs.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed in its latest employment report for October that while Americans enjoy continued 50-year-low unemployment thanks to President Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” economy, there is still no labor shortage for employers.

Overall, there are about 5.9 million unemployed Americans — including 726,000 American teenagers, 319,000 black Americans, and 242,000 Hispanics, all of whom want full-time jobs. Of those unemployed, about 1.3 million Americans have been jobless for at least 27 weeks.

Likewise, about 4.4 million Americans are working part-time jobs but want full-time employment. Another 1.2 million Americans are not in the labor force at all, though they want full-time jobs as well and had searched for jobs within the last year.

Of those Americans not in the labor force, 341,000 told the Labor Department that they were discouraged by their job prospects and believe there are no jobs for them.

While Americans have enjoyed significant wage growth in Trump’s economy, especially blue-collar and working-class Americans, corporate interests have increasingly suggested that the U.S. must continue importing millions of foreign workers every year to fill jobs.

In April, former Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donahue said the U.S. needed more legal immigration because the country is “out of people.”

Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s current legal immigration system — wherein 1.2 million mostly low-skilled workers are admitted annually — burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.

Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one-percent increase in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.