Immigrants get most of the new jobs

Immigrants are getting the new jobs:

In the past four years, the number of immigrants into the US, legal and illegal, has closely matched the number of new jobs. That suggests newcomers have, in effect, snapped up all of the new jobs.

"There has been no net job gain for natives," says Andrew Sum, an economist at Northeastern University.

Something similar has happened in Western Europe. Each year, about 500,000 to 800,000 illegal immigrants enter the 15 member nations of the European Union (not including the 10 new members as of last May), estimates Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. While it's more difficult for immigrants to get into Europe legally, once in they have more social and labor rights and protections than legal immigrants in the US do, says Mr. Papademetriou. And in Europe, illegal immigrants have a relatively bigger underground economy in which to find work.

If anything, the job outlook for native Europeans is bleaker than for Americans. Unemployment remains high in most of Europe. It hit 12.6 percent in Germany last month, the highest since World War II.

So with people from poor nations striving to get in and natives often losing out in the competition for many new jobs, the US and EU might be expected to have coherent immigration policies. Instead, chaos reigns.

Concerned with extremely low birthrates in Western Europe, the European Commission has suggested common policies to attract immigrants to fill longer-term needs for labor. Instead, national policies vary enormously.

In Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, for instance, illegal immigrants flood across the borders, despite efforts to stop them, and then once inside are frequently legalized by government edicts.

"There is no rhyme nor reason to much of this," says Mr. Papademetriou.

In the US, President Bush calls for giving millions of illegal immigrants a kind of guest-worker status as a legal path to US citizenship. So far, no specific legislation to implement his suggestion has been put before Congress.

Meanwhile, US border patrols spend millions of dollars a year trying to keep illegals out. And yet, they keep coming, evidently little discouraged by recession or the 9/11 attacks. In the past four years alone, the number of immigrants ran some 2.5 million to 3 million, of which about half were illegal.

They come for jobs, of course. And the Bush administration makes barely any effort to enforce current law. In 2003, a total of 13 employers were fined for hiring undocumented employees.

In fact, neither Republicans nor Democrats have promoted enforcement of immigration law prohibiting the hiring of illegal immigrants, says Mr. Sum, head of Northeastern's Center for Labor Market Studies.

So much for the average American and European benefiting from immigration.