More Immigrants, More Booms?

WSJ: "More Immigrants, More Jobs: Keeping America's door open has kept America's economy booming." And besides, immigration has kept London's Underground tube system booming, too!

Sure, there have been "more jobs" for immigrants, but there hasn't been any growth in the number of jobs for American-born citizens during the entire 4.5 years of the Bush Administration, as Edwin S. Rubenstein has been pointing out for years. You call that booming?

Paul Krugman writes in "The Dropout Puzzle:"

Or maybe the figures on unemployment are giving a false signal.

Economists who argue that there's something wrong with the unemployment numbers are buzzing about a new study by Katharine Bradbury, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which suggests that millions of Americans who should be in the labor force aren't. "The addition of these hypothetical participants," she writes, "would raise the unemployment rate by one to three-plus percentage points." ...

In fact, because older Americans, especially older women, are more likely to work than in the past, labor force participation should have risen, not fallen, over the past four years. As a result, she suggests that there may be "considerable slack in the U.S. labor market": there are at least 1.6 million and possibly as many as 5.1 million people who aren't counted as unemployed but would take jobs if they were available.

Of course, being Krugman, he refuses to mention the I-word as a major contributor.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer