U Not Gonna Like This

Sobering stats from Numbers USA:

Background: Some Americans and lawmakers make the common error to think that unemployment figures measure people without jobs. Rather, they measure only those people who are actively looking for jobs and have signed up with government unemployment agencies. The potential labor pool is far larger than the government reports because so many people are not in the labor market at all for the following reasons:

they were laid off and ran out of unemployment benefits;

they stopped work because of illness, injury, pregnancy and they didn't have enough incentive to look for a job or the jobs weren't attractive enough;

they failed to find a job for so long that they gave up; or

they are disabled (the vast majority of disabled American cannot get a job)


also on the sidebar of this page are the following stats:

14 million Americans are unable to find full-time jobs in the current economy. —

There are 55,436,000 million Americans, ages 16-64, who are not in the labor force.
— U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey; July, 2007 BLS

Forty percent of working-age African-American men are unemployed.
— BLS

Mind you these are just the numbers from the people that bother to register with the feds. (So it's much higher than that.)

and just a bit more from the bottom of the page:

There is some direct evidence that immigration has harmed less-educated natives; states with the largest increase in immigrants also saw larger declines in natives working; and in occupational categories that received the most new immigrants, native unemployment averages 10 percent.

Some of the occupations most impacted by immigration include maids, construction laborers, dishwashers, janitors, painters, cabbies, grounds keepers, and meat/poultry workers. The overwhelming majority of workers in these occupations are native-born.

It's a damn shame but yet it will continue as long as people keep putting the same clowns in office year after year..