While flow of legal permanent immigrants into the United States has averaged over 1 million a year, it now could be considered a detriment to the economy. While there are a variety of reasons of why immigration can help an economy and why it is morally justified, it makes you wonder if any of these matter if they do not have a job to go?

Consider between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector only rose by 1.1%. This even proves to be more interesting when you compare to the public sector to private.  Over the past 10 years, the private sector has generated roughly 1.1 million additional jobs and the public sector created about 2.4 million jobs.

So this indicates to me that the private sector has not been creating any jobs over the past 10 years as well as it cannot sustain any increase in population outside of the birth rate. This seems to be pretty obvious that if we have 14.8 million people unemployed and if you bring in approximately up to a million a year as immigrants it could have a negative impact if there are not job opportunities available.

In a sense the reasons seem obvious why to cut flows, this analysis does not even to consider however who will be creating these new jobs to stem the 9.7% unemployment rate and 14.8 million unemployed.

To drive the point about immigration flows, from the DOL the unemployment rate for whites is 8.7%, blacks 16.5 % and Hispanic 12.6%. It seems that the unemployment rate would also not be kind to immigrants as well have not considered further problems caused with illegal immigration.

In a sense for those who believe the government should be a lot smaller, perhaps the unemployment could be even higher without the public providing jobs. Be careful what you wish for.

Source:

(http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/economicsunbound/archives/2009/06/a_lost_decade_f.html)

(http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm)