326,000 Native-Born Americans Lost Their Job In November: Why This Remains The Most Important Jobs Chart

Friday's release of a "just right" jobs report, in which the US economy reportedly added 211,000 jobs, more than the 200,000 expected, solidified its position as the "most important" one in recent years, after it was broadly interpreted by economists as the sufficient condition for the Fed to hike rates on December 16, 7 years to the day after the same Fed cut rates to zero.

As such, if indeed the Fed does hike, over the next several quarters, the US labor data will take a secondary place in terms of importance unless, of course, it plummets in which case the Fed will be forced to quickly undo its tightening policy and go back to ZIRP, if not NIRP and more QE.

However, even as the Fed's "data (in)dependent" monetary policy takes on secondary relevance as we enter 2016, one aspect of the US jobs market is certain to take on an unprecedented importance.

We first laid out what that is three months ago when we said that "the one chart that matters more than ever, has little to nothing to do with the Fed's monetary policy, but everything to do with the November 2016 presidential elections in which the topic of immigration, both legal and illegal, is shaping up to be the most rancorous, contentious and divisive."

We were talking about the chart showing the cumulative addition of foreign-born and native-born workers added to US payrolls according to the BLS since December 2007, i.e., since the start of the recession/Second Great Depression.

Curiously, it is precisely this data that got absolutely no mention following yesterday's job report, about which the fawning mainstream media only noted, in passing, one negative aspect to the report: the fact that 319,000 part-time jobs for economic reasons were added in November. However, with Trump and his anti-immigration campaign having just taken the biggest lead in the Republican primary race, we are confident that the chart shown below will soon be recognizable to economic and political pundits everywhere.

And here is why we are confident this particular data should have been prominently noted by all experts when dissecting yesterday's job report: according to the BLS' Household Survey, while 375,000 foreign-born workers found jobs in November, a whopping 326,000 native-born Americans lost theirs.

How does this data look like over the long-run: presenting, the cumulative number of job gains by foreign born workers since December 2007. At 25.5 million, it is the highest in the series.

If only the chart for native-born workers was anything remotely as buoyant.

And here, as we have shown previously, is the most important jobs chart for 2016: since December 2007 the US economy added just 747,000 native-born workers (a number which tumbled as much as 8 million during the depths of the crisis), compared to a 260% greater increase in foreign-born workers, to just under 2.7 million.

We are confident that one can make the case that there are considerations on both the labor demand-side (whether US employers have a natural tendency to hire foreign-born workers is open to debate) as well as on the supply-side: it may be easier to obtain wage-equivalent welfare compensation for native-born Americans than for their foreign-born peers, forcing the latter group to be much more engaged and active in finding a wage-paying job.

However, the underlying economics of this trend are largely irrelevant: as the presidential primary race hits a crescendo all that will matter is the soundbite that over the past 8 years, 2.7 million foreign-born Americans have found a job compared to only 747,000 native-born. The result is a combustible mess that will lead to serious fireworks during each and every subsequent GOP primary debate, especially if Trump remains solidly in the lead.

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DS Magee 9 years ago Member's comment

WHO HAS THE CHART ON HOW MANY JOBS THAT USED TO BE BY AMERICANS (IN AMAERICA) ARE NOW GOING OVERSEAS? IT'S NOT JUST GARMENTS & STEEL, ETC. NOW IT'S HIGHLY TECHNICAL, HIGH-PAYING ENGINEERING JOBS. IT COSTS OUR KIDS $80-120k TO GET ENGINEERING DEGREES (TAUGHT BY MOSTLY FOREIGNERS WHO DON'T HAVE GOOD COMMAND OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE - SO PLEASE, NO "FREE" COLLEGE!!) AND THEN THEY GRADUATE AND CAN'T GET JOBS. IT'S A TRAVESTY! I SAY SEND YOUR KIDS TO TRADE SCHOOL FOR SOMETHING THAT CAN'T BE OUTSOURCED!

Sarah A 9 years ago Member's comment

I've looked at the so-called trade schools in the US and most in my area are just scams. It was easy for Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs to tout his site but I went to it and some of the links don't work and even some phone numbers are wrong when you try to call the trade schools.

Now whether or not learning a trade is worth your time is entirely up to you but most trades I evaluated tend to be sexist and have an aging male population majority. I wanted to go into engineering then found that the majority of those jobs are also being farmed out and 75% of graduates aren't working in the major they graduated in. Now that's a number no one wants to hear and when students are lied to and told they have to go to college in order to make any real money no one tells them they can't get scholarships or that financial aid in the form of grants has become so scarce.

Sarah A 9 years ago Member's comment

How can the foreign workers be referred to as "foreign-born Americans" while comparing them to "native-born Americans"? The jaw dropping data is bad enough and makes me wonder about the Boycott Disney movement. The former employees of Hewlett Packard, Sony, facebook, and Pixar have been blowing the whistle on unethical hiring practices and forcing employees to train their replacements for lousy severance packages. The employees have been blacklisted regardless of their compliance in their area of expertise. This is unnerving and has to be illegal. After reading about their humiliating terminations the replacements from India are obviously making less than the experts with advanced degrees were making.

Other countries have apologized in no way at all for cracking down on illegal immigration and on those who hire illegal immigrants. In the U.S. every criminal has the excuse of claiming they want to be an American without actually earning it, and let's not forget it idiotic hoops they jump through. Look at the Dominican Republic charging ahead and telling Haitians to leave before they're loaded onto buses. They took away any notion that Haitian women giving birth in the Dominican Republic would allow them to stay as these criminals will do in the U.S.. In Italy more items are made by illegal Chinese immigrants. Australia is deporting more and after they purposely sink their ships to be rescued, these criminals are loaded onto other ships to be sent back. Can anyone blame countries for doing this? I can't. Do these corrupt countries campaigning for their people to work in foreign countries so they can have a string of remittances flooding in to prop up their economies think it will last forever? Americans are fed up and have every right to be. We're paying $15 per tomato already and it's not worth it to subsidize poorly run corporations. Why do we keep being lied to about capitalism when we know that's not how this country is run?

I bet that our presidential race is going to become very ugly indeed when people have been lied to. I watched Democrats claim to represent the poor and middle class while proudly claiming they're going to give illegal immigrants amnesty - which people applauded! Sure, we'll have "free college for all" and not a word was mentioned as to how high taxes would go. The GOP ranted about how women can't make their own medical decisions and they ignored the wage difference between the genders. It makes me very uneasy when a Christian fundamentalist is going to make sick statements against women without anything but deafening applause to meet them. There are days when I wonder if our country has been crazy for a while and some people are slowly just now realizing this, myself included. Very little has been said about Social Security going bankrupt and Huckabee, a Baptist preacher is unfit for office - period.

This is just another terrible mess brought about by greed, apathy, and incompetent management. Unfortunately there are no easy solutions and when you look at the candidates none of them are the right fit and that's the worst part of all.

Currency Trader 9 years ago Member's comment

Well said.