Gordon Crovitz writing in the Wall Street Journal  this week argued for increased immigration to stimulate the economy.  Frankly his argument makes no sense to me.  If he were arguing for allowing some of the world’s best and brightest, then that makes some sense but he also argues for more unskilled laborers and amnesty for the illegal aliens already here.    Read his whole argument, here.   And consider it in light of yesterday’s post on the CIS study about the very high levels of unemployment among immigrants in the US right now—even the highly educated are not working.

One thing (of many things he said!) that I found puzzling was this comment:

It usually pays to be skeptical about immigration reform, given the alliance between nativists and labor unions for tighter borders. Still, an economic downturn is the right time to move on immigration, one of the few policy tools that could clearly boost growth.

I don’t know what alliance he is talking about, we see labor unions eager to get immigrant labor members.   The SEIU (Service Employees International Union) is organizing Somalis as just one example.

We knew this anecdotally, but now comes a report out today from the Center for Immigration Studies to confirm it.

WASHINGTON (April 30, 2009) – A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies finds that immigrants have been harder hit by the recession than natives. Unemployment among immigrants (legal and illegal) was higher in the first quarter of 2009 than at any time since 1994, when immigrant data was first collected separately. This represents a change from the recent past, when native-born Americans had the higher unemployment rate.

Read all the findings here.  Especially take note of the findings that confirm that highly educated immigrants are having a harder time finding jobs too.  We knew that already from our extensive coverage of the Iraqi refugees.

I came across this interesting chart that lists the percentages of countries’ native populations residing in the U.S.  It’s an odd metric, because a large country such as Mexico has a higher number of its native-born people living here (11.7 million!) than a smaller country such as Guyana (244,000), while Guyana’s percentage is 31.8 percent versus Mexico’s 10.8 percent.  The numbers seem to be more useful to the other countries than to us.  From our point of view, it’s more important that there are over 11 million people here who were born in Mexico than what the percentage is; from the Guyanese point of view, it would seem a desperate matter that almost a third of the people who were born there have moved to the United States, even though the absolute number is a small fraction of Mexico’s.

Hat tip: John Derbyshire, via The Audacious Epigone.