November 16, 2004

National Data, By Edwin S. Rubenstein

American Worker Displacement—We Unveil VDAWDI

Employers went on a hiring spree in October, adding 337,000 payroll jobs—the most in seven months. 

But Hispanic workers, comprising 15 percent of the U.S. labor force, landed about half of all those new jobs.

About 40 percent of Hispanics are foreign-born. Many more are the children of immigrants. For most older-stock Americans, therefore, this is still a "jobless recovery."

Needless to say, the Establishment media never focuses on these differences—that’s what VDARE.COM is for!

Here are October’s grim details from the household survey of employment: (Table 1)

Hispanics were the only group for which jobs increased faster than the number of job seekers. Hence these unemployment rates:

Because so many Hispanics are immigrants and the children of immigrants, Hispanic employment is the best proxy we can find in the monthly BLS job data for the impact of immigration on employment.

And the ratio of Hispanic to non-Hispanic employment indexes (January 2001=100.0) is a good measure of how immigrants have fared relative to native-born workers since the start of the Bush Administration. We call it the VDARE.COM American Worker Displacement Index [VDAWDI].

Here’s how October 2004 looks.

So October’s VDAWDI is 112.1 =100.0X(113.3/101.1)

In other words, since George Bush became President the immigrant job growth index has risen 12.1 percent more than the native job growth index.

This means that since Bush took office the rate of immigrant job growth has outpaced the rate of non-immigrant job growth by a factor of more than 12.

The cumulative trend of employment growth since the start of the Bush administration shows an increasingly large gap between Hispanic and non-Hispanic job creation.

Which makes a dramatic picture: 

Of course, in some months the positions will be reversed, i.e. immigrant workers will lose ground vis-à-vis natives, and VDAWDI will fall.

Over the long haul, however, immigrant job growth—proxied by Hispanic job growth—seems certain to outpace non-immigrant job growth substantially.

Implication: October 2004 (VDAWDI=112.1) may be remembered as a good month for native workers—relative to what is coming.

We’ll calculate the VDARE.COM Immigrant Employment Index as employment data are released every month and post the results here.

Wonder why no-one else thought of this?

[Number fans click here for tables.]