Black Unemployment Is at Record High

By Brenda Walker

05/13/2011

That hopey-changey thing offered by candidate Obama has not worked out so well in actual practice for black Americans. The President feels sure of their loyalty to him no matter what, so he confidently continues to work for a mass amnesty of illegal aliens which would enormously increase an already flooded pool of legal workers.

The article below doesn’t mention immigration, but adding 125,000 additional workers monthly via legal immigration is a stab in the back to all unemployed Americans.

When the economy was booming and business said it needed more foreign worker bees, Congress complied with additional visas of various categories. But now, with over 20 million Americans underemployed or out of work entirely, there is no parallel response in Washington. In fact, the President’s amnesty scheme would worsen the pain of unemployed citizens by increasing the number of workers competing for each available job.

Amnesty boosters live in a different universe where actual facts do not matter and political tom-foolery is spun up out of fables like America’s need for workers in some dim future. Mainstream economic prognosticators say some of the long-term unemployed may never work again. Even so, amnesty cheerleaders think America should stock up on millions of spare immigrants just in case.

America doesn’t need millions more excess workers, either from legal immigration or a massive amnesty for foreign lawbreakers.

Employment rate for black men at record low, Yahoo News, May 10, 2011

If the election of America’s first African-American president was expected to give blacks an economic boost, it hasn’t emerged yet. Indeed, the percentage of African-American men with a job has dropped to its lowest level since records began in 1972, according to the government’s monthly jobs report released last week.

Even as the economy added a better-than-expected 244,000 jobs, the percentage of black males over 20 who are currently employed dropped slightly to 56.9, the Labor Department’s April report shows. For whites, the equivalent figure is 68.1 percent.

Before this recession, the percentage of black adult men with a job had never dropped below 60 percent, according to Labor Department statistics.

And among blacks, it’s not just men who are suffering. Just 51.5 percent of African-Americans across the board-compared to 59.5 percent of whites-have a job, the numbers show. That’s the lowest level for blacks since 1984. (That group includes 16- to 19-year-olds, who are employed at a far lower rate than their elders.)

These employment rates are calculated differently from the top-line unemployment rate, which includes only those actively looking for work, and inched back up last month to 9 percent.

Heather Boushey, an economist with the liberal Center for American Progress, told The Lookout it’s not just African-Americans who have been hit particularly hard. It’s also other traditionally struggling groups, such as ex-offenders and those without a college degree.

"Anyone who would be last on an employer’s list to get a job is really in bad shape" in the current downturn, Boushey said.

And employers' hiring practices may be making the problem worse. As we've reported, online job listings telling the unemployed not to apply have proliferated in recent years. The federal government is currently probing whether such listings illegally discriminate against African Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be among the jobless.

Nonetheless, much of the media has focused on the travails of educated white men-still a comparatively flourishing group-during the downturn.

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