If you thought the headline jobs print was bad, wait till you see this.
While we will show the quality of the jobs shortly (you guessed it: waiters and bartenders jumped, manufacturing workers tumbled), with the presidential elections, in which immigration has become the key topic coming up, a far more relevant issue is the spread between "native-born" workers (as defined by the BLS), and "foreign-born." Expect the September data to provide much fodder for the upcoming republican and democratic debates.
But before we show what happened, here is a quick glance at the breakdown between full and part-time jobs in September. According to the BLS, 53,000 part-time jobs were added in September. The offset: a drop of 185,000 full-time jobs. Welcome, once again, to the part-time recovery we first profiled in December 2010 [4].
[5]
With that out of the way, here is the punchline (which is likely related). While we "know" that a paltry 142K jobs were added according to the Establishment survey, a far more disturbing trend emerges when observing the Household survey, which conveniently breakdown down the number of "native-born" and "foreign-born" workers. In September, the latter rose by 14,000 to 24,928.
That was the good news. The bad news: native-born workers saw their ranks tumble by 262,000!
[6]
More disturbing, as the following chart shows, after briefly topping their December 2007 level, native-born jobs (blue line below) are now in danger of once again going back into the red. In the meantime, foreign-born workers are steadily increasing (and helping populate all those "part-time" jobs)
[7]
Finally, this is what the native-vs-foreign born discrepancy looks like since December 2007: in the past 8 years, there has been 300% more foreign-born workers added than native-born.
Prepare to hear much more about this statistics in the coming GOP presidential debates.
[8]
Source: Native-Born [9]and Foreign-Born [10] [10]
