Barack Obama was wrong in the debate with Hillary Clinton when he said immigrants were scapegoated for lower black labor force participation rates. Its not just black unemployment rates are high, but blacks and black men in particular don’t have jobs.
The labor force participation rate is the number of people employed or looking for work in a group divided by the number in that group. Employed population is those with a job over the population size. Unemployment rate misses discouraged workers and those who don’t try.
The labor force participation rates of white and black men were equal to each other and to 80 percent in 1965. For white men it is now 74 percent. For black men it is now 66 percent.
Men’s median wages are the same as in 1973. So wages stayed the same but employment fell. This means there was a substitution in supply. For men that includes women working but it also includes immigration. Women don’t take the construction jobs that Hillary Clinton mentioned black men complaining are for Hispanics only.
Wages stayed the same for men from 1973 but their employment fell. That is from a substitution of supply for men. There is no other explanation. A society that doesn’t have work for men is a dead society walking. That is what people know. Its Obama who won’t listen or pay attention.
Median wage graph on page 16 for men and women separately:
File Format: Microsoft Excel – View as HTML
Civilian labor force participation rate by demographic characteristic, 1965–2006 … 3, Year or month, All civilian workers, White 2, Black and other or … www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/2007/B40.xls – Similar pages
There is a substitution effect from black and white employment to immigrant employment. But labor force participation rates are projected to fall for Hispanic men and Asian men over the next 10 years as well as for white men.
Black men are projected to rise slightly from 2006 to 2016 but the 2004 to 2014 forecast was for their rate to fall. But the point is stagnant wages and stagnant job prospects.
Labor productivity has grown 1.5 percent to 3 percent per year since 1967. See graph:
If we take 1967 to now we have 40 years roughly. So even at 2 percent growth per year, one gets 80, which compounds to more than doubling using the rule of 72. (Actually the rule of 69, but who knows natural logarithms anymore?)
So productivity doubled while men’s wages stayed the same and their employment fell. That means a massive new supply that did that. That has to include immigration. It also doesn’t make sense that women wanted to work while men didn’t. Instead, as immigration took men’s jobs in construction and so on, women had to work. Women are sometimes the sole worker in the family not the additional worker. That is caused by immigration.
In Question 74 of the New York Times CBS Poll, 69 percent of what were judged usable respondents said that illegals should be prosecuted and deported. This is reported in their lengthy pdf file available here.
74. Should illegal immigrants be prosecuted and deported for being in the U.S. illegally, or shouldn’t they?
The Poll’s Goals
“The New York Times reports its own poll on immigration, complete with slanted questions and a slanted cherry-picking of the answers.” Posted by: Tim Graham 5/25/2007 3:33:00 PM. Graham points out the inconsistency of the answers for Q74, not mentioned in NYT article, and other questions highlighted in the NYT article.
The NYT and its pdf give no information on how many people were contacted initially to come up with the final list of usable responses. Many of the questions are not reported even in the pdf.
Q74 is almost at the end of the NYT survey. This is after all the positive information on the bill has been given as part of or before other questions. At this point, the pollster can’t drop the person without losing all the time spent on the previous, apparently, 73 questions. A cynic might infer that the NYT poll couldn’t disqualify people for answering yes to Q74 without losing the answers they wanted for the other questions?
In some cases, the NYT CBS poll gave people information and then asked them questions in light of that information. This information was only positive for the bill? So it appeared to this reader.
What about giving information about jobs. Consider the following potential questions based on information provided.
Info provided:
The census, an office of the US government, reports that the median wages of men have been the same since 1973, see graph page 18. The increase in legal and illegal immigration started in 1965.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports (in an Excel spreadsheet) that since1965 the labor force participation rates of white men fell from 80 percent to 75 percent and black men from 80 percent, about the same as whites to 66 percent.
NYT CBS style Questions following this fact:
Do you think immigration is why 75 percent of white men and 66 percent of black men still have jobs?
Yes.
Yes.
Do we need more immigration so that white and black men can keep the jobs they still have?
Yes.
Yes.
Do you believe that median wages for men would be substantially lower except for the positive benefits of immigration on wages?
Yes.
Yes.
Do you think that the only thing that can keep wages of men from going down is more immigration?
The top 1 percent got 20 percent of income before income restriction in the 1920′s, 10 percent and heading lower before the 1965 Immigration Act (legal immigration), and are now back up to 20 percent and headed higher.
Would income inequality have been even lower in the 1950′s if there had been immigration at the bottom of the U?
Yes.
Yes.
Is the only thing that is keeping income inequality from being higher today the high influx of poor people whose great number averages out with that of the rich to keep income inequality down?
Yes.
No, I went to school before they fell apart, but I’m sure if I went to them today I would answer yes.
If there are enough poor people, who are all equally poor, it doesn’t matter if there are a few rich people. Its just envy of the rich to disagree with this outcome, and bigotry of the middle class towards the poor to try to keep them out?
Yes.
I think I heard a luncheon speaker say this, it must be true.
–Next Question
7 of the top 8 wealthiest Senators voted for S. 2611, amnesty, affirmative action, non-deportable crime, and a pathway for the top 1 percent of households to continue to enjoy 20 percent of each year’s income, compared to 10 percent before Kennedy’s 1965 Immigration Act. The only 1 of the top 8 who didn’t vote for S. 2611 didn’t vote, Jay Rockefeller. McCain is 7th and Kennedy 8th in wealth.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households — a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census.
The first census was in 1790. The census is reporting the unhelpful information that men’s median wages are the same since 1973, (graph page 18) and that women’s wages today, and blacks are lower than all men’s wages were in 1973.
How can we teach the census to do better work?
Get them to drop respondents who have the wrong answers.
Tell people with the wrong answers they are bigots.
Exclude blacks, whites, men, women, Hispanics, and Asians, unless they get speaking fees of $50,000 per lunch.
Find one lesbian Hispanic immigrant female who makes more than the median wage of men in 1973 and put her picture on census.gov in place of all these pdf’s full of wrong graphs (page 18).
If we had called Pat Buchanan a bigot one more time, we wouldn’t have these problems.
Posted by: Michael Medved at 10:29 PMMedved slams Rasmussen for not push polling for immigration. Instead Rasmussen just asks if they support the bill without giving them any information.
Here are two data that blow out of the water the idea that most Muslims are “moderates,” i.e., that most Muslims believe in Islam only as an individual religion, not as a political religion. Andrew Bostom writes:
Polling data just released (April 24, 2007) in a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/ WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007–1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians–reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed–almost 2/3, hardly a “fringe minority”–desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”), including 49% of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims. The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved the proposition “To require a strict [emphasis added] application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country.”
Worse, the more information the pollsters give those questioned — about current levels of immigration, alternative policies, fiscal costs — the more strongly they oppose the legislation. So you need to get hurry this bill through the entire legislative process before Americans learn what’s in it.
