Nearly 17 million Americans remain unemployed in the United States economy, though all want full-time jobs, as President Joe Biden’s administration looks to pack the labor market with foreign workers.
The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for February finds that about ten million Americans are unemployed, 6.9 million are out of the labor force entirely and 6.1 million remain underemployed, but all want full-time work with competitive wages and good benefits.
Of the ten million Americans unemployed, 4.1 million have been jobless for 27 weeks or more. Nearly 14 percent of those counted as unemployed by BLS are teenagers, 9.9 percent are black Americans, 8.5 percent are Hispanic, and 5.6 million are white Americans.
As the economy reopens, federal enhancements to unemployment insurance could create temporary labor shortages because of the potential for workers to get more in benefits than they would earn in wages.
The jobless data, though, reveals the extent to which claims of a shortage of labor are widely oversold by big business and corporate interests who have consistently asked for increases to legal immigration levels.
The Biden administration, despite facing a continued unemployment crisis, has sought to increase overall immigration levels to the U.S. and pack the labor market with more foreign workers. In his most recent move, Biden lifted a Trump-era executive order that slowed down certain green card categories to decrease foreign competition in the labor market.
Likewise, the Biden administration has released into the U.S. more than a thousand migrants enrolled in the now-defunct Remain in Mexico program in just two weeks. Those who are adults will be able to apply for work permits to take jobs in the economy.
Already, current immigration levels put downward pressure on U.S. wages while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth away from America’s working and middle class and towards employers and new arrivals, research by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has found.
Similarly, peer-reviewed research by economist Christoph Albert acknowledges that “as immigrants accept lower wages, they are preferably chosen by firms and therefore have higher job finding rates than natives, consistent with evidence found in U.S. data.” Albert’s research also finds that immigration “raises competition” for native-born Americans in the labor market.
Americans overwhelmingly support decreasing overall immigration to the U.S., recent surveys have found. The latest Rasmussen Reports survey showed that nearly seven-in-ten likely voters support mandatory E-Verify to ban illegal hiring, 73 percent support reducing legal immigration levels, and 64 percent said businesses should recruit Americans for jobs rather than importing foreign workers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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