A Decade of Immigrant Gains and Citizen Losses

According to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) jobs for immigrants increased while jobs for native citizens decreased between the year 2000 and 2010. During that time period the number of immigrants working increased by 4.5 million while the number of native citizens working went down by 1.1 million. This decrease in jobs for Americans came as the number of working age Americans increased by 13.5 million compared to 6.5 million for immigrants.

To sum this up in layman's terms it means that even though immigrants are nowhere close to breeding out the native born population of the United States more of them are working. This could be due to a number of things like them being willing to work for less money, selfish business owners who would rather pick up illegal aliens to do cheap work than pay an honest American, or maybe the Americans just don't feel like working anymore. The latter is highly unlikely, so obviously something needs to be done to fight this. One possible solution would be to require businesses to give preferences to Americans in the hiring process and only hire immigrants if qualified Americans cannot be found. This would limit immigrant workers to jobs nobody wants unless they are highly qualified and offer a skill (ex: doctor, rocket scientist) that companies have a hard time finding.