Analysis: In Obama’s economy, immigrants outpace native-born Americans
The Daily Caller | October 1, 2012 | Neil Munro
Immigrant job-seekers have gained far more in President Barack Obama’s weak economy than have native-born Americans, according to government data.
Since Obama’s inauguration, employers have fired and hired millions of workers during the bust and slow recovery. The net result is that they employed more than 1.7 million more immigrants — but only 418,000 more native-born Americans — in August 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey.
That number “seems like a usable tool on the table if [Gov. Mitt] Romney wanted to use it … to drive up [his] numbers,” a GOP operative told The Daily Caller.
Romney may want to leverage those numbers. He’s lagging among a winnable and critical constituency — swing-voting, working class whites in the Midwest — whom Washington, D.C. has forced to compete against the huge influx of low-skill, low-wage immigrants.
“The number sounds right,” said Mark Weaver, a GOP consultant in Ohio. “There are parts of Ohio that would be receptive to the message that Barack Obama has opened the door to illegal immigration that is taking jobs from Ohioans.”
The numbers
The job data is collected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly survey of American households. The survey shows that immigrants won three out of every four jobs added since January 2009′s employment totals, even though immigrants are only one-sixth of the workforce in a nation of 310 million people....