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Race, Ethnicity, and the Job Market - No wonder white workers are so mad. They really are falling behind.


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2019 Mar 20, 5:26pm   1,098 views  13 comments

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Donald Trump demonstrated the power and broad appeal of attacking immigrants, particularly of color, in 2016. He did it again in last year’s midterm elections, when his passionate followers seemingly were unmoved by the cruelty of separating young children from their mothers at the border, or by Trump’s audacious claim of presidential powers to nullify the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. Race-baiting is often an integral part of right-wing populist politics, and of the President’s broader personal brand of nationalism.

Yet the response (or lack thereof) to his racialized anti-immigrant themes is based on more than simple prejudice, since we know that millions of Trump voters once backed Barack Obama and millions more were long-time traditional “Main Street” Republicans.

For a fuller understanding of Trumpism, I dug into the official jobs numbers over the past decade. These data help reveal the real economic foundations for many Republican voters’ current hostility toward diversity, especially among the nearly-two thirds of white adults who do not have college degrees. They show two realities. First, that employers have a strong preference for hiring college-educated job candidates; and second, that increasing diversity in employment has produced distinct losers as well as winners over the current business cycle. The data document clearly that new employment at every educational level has tilted strongly toward Hispanics and Asians, and strongly away from whites. Consider the following: The number of employed white high school graduates plummeted by 4,854,694 from January 2008 to August 2018, a 16.9 percent decline despite nine years of economic expansion—while the number of employed non-white high school graduates increased 3,343,341, or 27.2 percent over the same period.

Social scientists have not examined these issues with sufficient care, political consultants even less so. They need to reconsider the employment data for the last decade. Progressives generally need to think hard about this, too. There is a conviction among many on the left that bigotry alone fuels anti-immigrant views, and those holding those views are irredeemable “deplorables.” But the power of that cultural explanation also relies on the conspicuous absence of an economic explanation. The numbers I studied provide such an explanation. If supporters of a diverse economy and country cannot recognize this dilemma, the job issues that millions of their fellow Americans face will only worsen, with the potential result that right-wing populists will win and progressives will lose more elections.



The Labor Market’s Sharp Tilt in Favor of College Graduates …

Everyone knows that college graduates enjoy a strong advantage in landing new jobs. Yet, the full extent of that edge is still unappreciated by most people. From January 2008 to August 2018, covering both the initial losses in the Great Recession and sustained gains over more than nine years of economic recovery and expansion, total employment increased by a net 8.8 million. On top of that, the economy shed nearly 7. 7 million jobs between January 2008 and January 2010 but then restored those jobs from January 2010 to April 2014. So, all told, the changes in the makeup of employment occurred through the destruction of 7.7 million jobs followed by the creation of 16.5 million jobs.

Through that process, the number of employed people with high school diplomas or less contracted by nearly 4.3 million, and jobs held by people with college training short of a bachelor’s degree rose by just 750,000. Meanwhile, the number of employed college graduates increased nearly 12.4 million. Pause for a moment to consider what these numbers mean. Most employers have little or no interest in creating new jobs for non-college graduates, but their demand for college graduates is so great that the increase in jobs held by people with bachelor’s degrees was equivalent to 140 percent of the total net increase in jobs. These new hard facts of economic life in the United States are summarized below.

Table 1. Changes in Employment by Educational Level, January 2008 to August 2018


Full Article, about 5- 8 minutes to read: https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/race-ethnicity-and-the-job-market/

Time to post a reaction without reading or considering what is being discussed in the article- less than one minute

#Jobs #Immigration #Inequality #Racism

Comments 1 - 13 of 13        Search these comments

1   SunnyvaleCA   2019 Mar 20, 6:13pm  

The first two paragraphs demonstrate that the author doesn't know Trump's base. Using words like "radicalized anti-immigrant themes" isn't going to get you anywhere in changing minds. Not to worry ... after a bunch of anti-Trump and anti-whites rhetoric we get to the conclusions of how to fix this country: free college, more money for Obamacare, Medicare for a bunch more people, more laws about "fair" pay and employment, pathway to citizenship for illegals, minimum wage increases.
2   FortWayneAsNancyPelosiHaircut   2019 Mar 20, 6:30pm  

Trump didn’t attack immigrants of color. He never brought up color, that was liberals.
3   Bd6r   2019 Mar 20, 6:54pm  

SunnyvaleCA says
how to fix this country

affirmative action for poor whites
4   AD   2019 Mar 20, 7:55pm  

Well speaking of immigration, does the H-1B visa program count ?

Ok so more are employed that have a college degree and less are employed who at best have a high school degree.

Maybe all those construction and manual labor jobs requiring a high school degree only are off-the-books and are being filled by illegal immigrants ?

I saw in the Economist ? a diagram that showed over 50% of construction work in California was completed by illegal immigrants. How do they track those illegal immigrants in the statistics ?

Since they are "off-the-books" then they are not counted in the statistics for August 2018, but maybe were account for in January 2008 ? Hence, that is why there is a major drop in the high school degree jobs.
5   AD   2019 Mar 20, 7:56pm  

FortWayneIndiana says
Trump didn’t attack immigrants of color. He never brought up color, that was liberals.


Because he reversed Obama's policy on open borders, he gets ridiculed as being anti immigrant.
6   Bd6r   2019 Mar 21, 8:29am  

AD says
speaking of immigration, does the H-1B visa program count

Left mix up legal and illegal immigration on purpose.
BTW H1B does not necessarily means immigration.
7   Expat01   2019 Mar 21, 9:03am  

Sorry, what's the point? White have been privileged for centuries. Redressing those privileges seems to be reverse discrimination (How dare you take away my caviar and feed the poor instead!).
Perhaps if non-college educated whites are losing ground it's because they are lazier and dumber than non-college educated minorities. Whites have lived on privilege for a long time and perhaps don't feel the need to make an effort. Blacks, Asians and Hispanics know they need to try harder. So you blame them for being too hard-working. Well, that's a change from "lazy niggers or lazy taco-benders".
I have a hard time shedding tears for a bunch of ignorant morons wearing MAGA hats who blame their misery on immigrants and fail to see that the millionaires they elect are fucking them over much worse. What happened to taking down Wall Street or the Military-Industrial complex? Gone away when some ignorant cunt with orange hair riles up the crowds and tells them it's rapists coming over the border who are to blame.
Fuck off, America.
8   Shaman   2019 Mar 21, 9:42am  

Expat01 says
Sorry, what's the point?


Proving once again that you can’t educate the stupid.
Reading comprehension is completely beyond some people.
9   SunnyvaleCA   2019 Mar 21, 10:06am  

If you want to help the uneducated and unskilled whites in this country, then stop allowing in millions of uneducated and unskilled immigrants as over-competition. That's not rocket science. That, and improving our industrial base and export economy, is the main gist of Trump's presidency.

Whites can't get construction jobs because they don't speak the required language: Spanish. Seriously, how screwed up is that.
10   MrMagic   2019 Mar 21, 11:06am  

Expat01 says
Fuck off, America.


Kaki, is that you with an alternate screen name?
11   AD   2019 Mar 21, 11:13am  

Expat01 says
Fuck off, America.


And fuck off Kremlin and ChiCom Trolls
12   Onvacation   2019 Mar 21, 11:26am  

Expat01 says
Whites have lived on privilege for a long time

That sounds kind of racist.
13   Onvacation   2019 Mar 21, 11:28am  

Expat01 says
Blacks, Asians and Hispanics know they need to try harder.

Not in California.

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