How I Almost Lost My Left Nut on Facebook

Subtitle: A Layperson’s "Take" on Recent Jobs Data and the Role of Immigration in the U.S. Economy

This past week I shot from the hip in response to a friend’s political post on Facebook. A civilized back-and-forth ensued. In due course I looked stuff up and walked back some of the things I originally asserted. This is part of the eternal search for truth, and, thus, a good thing.

This piece rambles a bit. In the best of all possible worlds, I would break it into several posts. I don’t live in that world. Anyway, the Republican candidates rambled on for three hours last night. I only ask for equal rambling time. Part I of this post looks at the recent jobs report and reaction thereto. Part II explores the role of immigrants in the U.S. economy. Part III speculates on the reasonableness of immigrants getting 40% of new jobs. Part IV posits some consequences of draconian immigration policies. WARNING: the following post contains statistics.
 
Part I After this month’s (September 4, 2015) generally positive jobs report, a Tea Partyite Facebook friend posted an article from an organization called CNSNews.com (“The Right News, Right Now”) with the provocative headline:

Record 94,031,000 Americans Not in Labor Force

Implication was all is going to hell in a hand basket. Stupid me thought things were getting incrementally better with 173,000 new jobs for August and a drop in the unemployment rate to 5.1%.

I posted a snarky reply inquiring whether my friend and I were living on the same planet as we didn’t seem to be getting the same news.

In fact, we were getting the same news, just prioritizing it differently. Buried under Other Notes, eight paragraphs into the CNSNews.com article, I located the aforementioned “173,000 new jobs” and “5.1% unemployment rate.”

Still it seemed a bit odd to lead with the number of people not working.

Then I noticed that Rush Limbaugh and his arch-conservative brethren were latching onto this 94 million unemployed figure like it was their last drop of mother’s milk. During his August 20, 2015 show, Limbaugh pontificated:

"94 Million Americans not working, but they're all eating. Let's just not stop there. They probably all have transportation. Many of them, we know, have air conditioning. Many of them have big screen or some kind of TV. Many of them have cable…(garbled) a lot of Obamaphones out there."

It doesn’t appear Limbaugh understands what this statistic means. His comment implies it represents all the unemployed people on welfare, a group he regularly deprecates. It doesn’t.

94 million Americans not working translates into a statistic called the U.S. labor force participation rate. It only makes sense expressed as a percentage of the potential U.S. workforce, defined as the number of non-incarcerated civilians over the age of 16, of which there are currently about 251 million.

Today the U.S. labor participation rate is 62.6%. This is a 38-year low. To be fair, it is a cause for concern. This statistic has dropped steadily since 2000 when it reached a historic high of 67.3%.

There are legitimate reasons why people are unemployed and yet not looking for work. The “Baby Boomer” generation is now retiring in droves. Many young people attend school well into their 20s. Older adults return to school to prepare for second and/or better careers. Recently I fell into this category, and now, I’m happy to say, I’m gainfully employed. Many working-age adults are disabled (I’m a nurse. I take care of them.). Many are stay-at-home parents. Stay-at-home parents work, they just don’t get credit for being in the work force. Finally, there are people who would like to work, but have become discouraged at finding a job and essentially dropped out of the labor market. These folks won’t be counted in the official unemployment rate. But this is not a new phenomenon. There have always been “discouraged workers,” and counting their number and analyzing their drag on the economy has always been a dicey proposition.

So the sky-is-falling cry of "94 million Americans not working!" is a bit disingenuous. Especially when the positive trend in the unemployment rate is simultaneously ignored. To do otherwise would be to give credit to President Obama’s economic policies, and the 1st rule of Tea Partydom is never credit President Obama with anything positive.

U.S. Unemployment Rate (Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 8, 2012)

The graph above shows the steady drop in the unemployment rate starting one year after President Obama took office.

To help me get a better idea what a reasonable labor force participation rate might be, I checked the statistic for two other major economies: Japan’s is 59.6% and Germany’s is 59.9%. In comparison, the U.S. number doesn’t look bad. 

National economies are complex. No single statistic tells the whole story. So, if any talking head fixates on one number, ignores everything else, and tells you either the apocalypse is near, or roses are blooming in winter, be wary, be very wary.

A Brief Digression About Obamaphones  Rush Limbaugh enjoys belittling folks who aren't members of his country club. It's his shtick. After an inarticulate African American woman blurted out on camera in 2012 that she would support Obama because he "gave" her a cell phone, Limbaugh wept with joy knowing he had found the perfect means to keep his listeners perpetually angry--just throw out the occasional "Obamaphone" on the air.

As it turns out the "Obamaphone" was likely provided by an FCC program, called Lifeline Assistance, started under Ronald Reagan. It's a means-tested program that provides a pre-paid cell phone to help poor folks call 911 when ill, enroll their kids in daycare, find and keep a job, etc. It helps elderly poor, rural poor, urban poor, white poor, black poor...basically it helps poor people manage already difficult lives. 

 
PART II My social media conversation did not end there. My friend conceded that maybe the unemployment rate was better, but all the new jobs were going to immigrants. I was skeptical. I boldly announced that I would “bet my left nut they (immigrants) make up less than 5% of new jobs for the month.”

Good thing he didn’t take the bet, or I’d be a one-nutter, or, at the very least, asking a judge to rule on whether I lose the nut. According to a 2012 Brookings Institute study, 41.5% of new jobs went to foreign born workers between 2005 and 2010; somewhat less than the 45.7% of new jobs that went to foreign born workers between 1995 and 2000, perhaps reflecting more restrictive immigration policies after September 11, 2001. A separate 2012 PEW Research Center study put the number of new jobs to foreign born workers at 35%. So let's say the real number lies between 35% and 41.5%.

It seems the truth lies somewhere between me and my Facebook opponent. Less than a majority of new jobs go to immigrants, however, the number is far greater than the “less than 5%” I originally speculated. I leave it to you, dear reader, to determine whether I won or lost this bet.

PART III For better or worse, we are a nation that is not replacing itself. The Los Angeles Times reported this month that the U.S. birth rate rose slightly to 62.9 live births per 1000 women. This translates into approximately 1.9 live births over each woman’s lifetime. Here’s the rub, In order to keep our population stable, we need 2.1 live births per woman. The only reason the U.S. population keeps increasing today is immigration—legal and otherwise.

When economists discuss economic performance, they (should) separate what portion of growth is fueled by population growth and what portion represents the increasing productivity of the work force, known as per capita growth. Usually what is reported every month is change in the gross domestic product (GDP), corrected for inflation but otherwise combining the effects of population growth and worker productivity.

  So here is my back-of-the-envelope estimate of the effect of immigration on the economy and by extension job growth. There are four pieces to this argument:

• Over the past ten years, the U.S. economy has had ups and downs. In 2008 and 2009 it had negative growth, the so-called Great Recession. The average annual growth in GDP over this period was 1.58%. The average per capita growth was 0.71%. The difference, theoretically attributable to population growth, was 0.87% (1.58%-0.71% = 0.87%).
• Between the years 2010 and 2014, the Census Bureau reported that the U.S. population increased from 309 million to 319 million, about 0.8% per year. This more or less matches the figure arrived at above for population-related economic growth (0.8% ≈ 0.87%). In other words there is a 1 to 1 relationship between population growth and the associated portion of economic growth. Makes sense, right? Population growth generates its own economic activity. If we assume, for the reasons stated above, that a large chunk of population growth comes from immigration, then it follows that an equivalent portion of population-related GDP growth is due to immigrants.
• A Brookings Institute study estimates that immigrants make up 16% of the labor force as compared to 13% of the population. In other words immigrants are slightly over-represented in the work force.
• Economic growth leads to lower unemployment, i.e., new jobs. The empirical relationship between the two things is a bit complicated. Google Okun’s Law for more details.

To summarize...Immigration leads to population growth leads to economic growth. As immigrants are over-represented in the work force, I assert as reasonable that immigrants are hired at a rate roughly equivalent to their contribution to economic growth, i.e., the 35%-41.5% of new jobs to immigrants cited above makes sense. This will likely remain true as long as immigration is the prime driving force behind U.S. population growth.

PART IV For Americans who oppose immigration, there is some bad news here. Curtailing future immigration would significantly slow U.S. economic growth. Deporting the 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants (assuming this was practical) would likely cause a major recession. 

In order to stabilize the U.S. population without immigration, we would need to persuade native-born women to have more children. I speculate that to do so would require some major social legislation re-jiggering, making it cheaper and easier to have children, e.g., tax incentives, better child-care options, family-friendlier workplace rules, etc. Things neither Rush Limbaugh nor any Republican presidential candidate advocate.

How Far Shall We Go?

The frenzy over the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina state house has largely abated—at least in the national press. South Carolina removed its flag on July 10^th. But this doesn’t mean that the Confederate flag issue, or, more broadly speaking, the Confederate symbol issue has gone away.

Sitting around the dinner table with friends shortly after the Emanuel AME church shooting in June, the talk turned to the (then) proposed removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house. A lively back-and-forth ensued, ending with the questions—not answered that evening—Say the Confederate flag goes away, what’s next? How far shall we go? 

Confederate symbols and memorials abound in the South. Are they now part of our national history, and in this sense exempt from present-day protest? Or do they represent a false past that should be corrected?

Graffiti on the Confederate Defenders
of Charleston monument

Among numerous military-themed monuments in White Point Garden, a public park in Charleston, SC, one commemorates the Confederate soldiers who defended the city during the Civil War. A naked warrior holding a broken sword and a shield emblazoned with the South Carolina seal defends a female figure representing the city of Charleston. Inscribed on the base is “Count them happy who for their faith and their courage endured a great fight.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) put up the memorial in 1932. On the one hand it is a simple homage to men who died in battle, on the other it implies the men died in a righteous cause. Not surprisingly (to me anyways) it was spray painted with “Black Lives Matter” in the wake of the Emanuel AME shooting.

In a prior post I noted that the Confederate battle flag still flies above a southern state house in the form of the Mississippi state flag. A Facebook friend shared a headline from a southern Mississippi TV station’s web site (WLOX-TV). It announced the resolution by the national NAACP demanding the state change its flag. I read through the posted comments (there were hundreds), overwhelmingly attacking the NAACP resolution. Here follows a sampling:

• “Unlike South Carolina, Mississippi will not be bullied by blacks or the liberals they rode in on.”
• “NAACP take your racist BS and stick it. We the people of Mississippi have already voted to keep our flag.”
• “The NAACP is the biggest racist group there is…”
• “Put flags in every yard my fellow Mississippi friends…”
• “I’ve got one flying in my yard right now right between the Confederate flag and the American flag. They aren’t going anywhere.”
• “The name NAACP offends me. It [sic] racist right in the name.”
• “I’ve been saying this whole time that the flag debates, arguments, and everything else is covering up something the government doesn’t want us to know.”

A lot of familiar themes here—anger and vitriol directed at any outsider who suggests that Mississippi change its ways (NAACP, blacks, liberals), a self-righteous turning of the tables (we’re not racist, you’re racist), the weird conflation of the Confederate flag and the American flag (implying both are expressions of patriotism, one is, the other isn’t), and the suspicion that it’s all a government plot (it is). Even South Carolina gets thrown under the bus. What’s missing in these posts is any empathy towards the large black minority, 37% of the state population, who likely perceive the state flag in a completely different way.

I’m a Pennsylvanian. If my neighbor announced he was going to burn the Pennsylvania state flag, my reaction would be, “knock yourself out.” I don’t even know what it looks like. Perhaps all state flags should be innocuous and forgettable.

As of a month ago, nine southern states permitted the sale of Confederate flag specialty license plates. However, this may be changing quickly. Interestingly the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in June that Texas had the right not to issue Confederate flag license plates. The Court argued that license plates are official documents, and as such, convey messages with which the state presumably agrees. Several governors have already acted to curtail sale of these specialty plates.

The South still memorializes the Confederacy with state holidays. Robert E. Lee Day or a variant, Lee-Jackson Day, is observed in Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia. Three states perversely pair it with Martin Luther King Day. Many of the same states also observe a Confederate Memorial Day or, as it’s known in Texas, Confederate Heroes Day. Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi celebrate Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s birthday. Tennessee uniquely celebrates the birthday of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, reputedly the first Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Grand Wizard and commanding officer of Confederate troops who slaughtered some 300 mostly African-American Union soldiers who had surrendered to his forces at Fort Pillow in April 1864.

To my knowledge none of these states has considered setting aside a day to memorialize an estimated 80,000 African slaves who died during the “Middle Passage” to the United States or the 4,000 African-Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950. [1]

Statues of Confederate heroes, usually astride a horse, and usually Robert E. Lee, dot the public landscape of Southern cities. Among the most prominent of these is a colossal statue of Lee on horseback on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. Writing in Slate, Maurie McInnis reports that the dedication of this statue in 1890 was accompanied by a parade of 20,000 Confederate veterans. The significance was not lost on Richmond’s black population. It effectively marked the beginning of the “Jim Crow” system of racial segregation that remained firmly in place until the Brown v Board of Education of Topeka ruling by the Supreme Court some 64 years later.

Bas-relief carving of Confederate Heroes
at Stone Mountain, Georgia

On the volcanic rock outcropping called Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta, there is a massive bas-relief sculpture of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, all on horseback, hats over their hearts, seemingly riding off to some Confederate hero’s Valhalla. The back story is less ennobling. Samuel Venable owned the mountain at the turn of the 20^th century.  In 1915 he facilitated the revival of the KKK by allowing the group to use Stone Mountain as the site of its kickoff cross burning ceremony. Later he gave the KKK a legal easement to continue holding meetings there. About the same time Venable deeded the north face of the mountain to the UDC for the express purpose of creating a Confederate memorial. While the work was started in 1916, it was abandoned in 1928, presumably because money ran out. The state of Georgia purchased Stone Mountain in 1958 and then completed the sculpture over the next 14 years. It is now run as a fun-for-the-whole-family theme park complete with an “authentic” antebellum plantation, Skyride, scenic train, putt-putt golf, museum, et cetera, all under the stoney visages of the noble lords of the Confederacy.

The criticism implied by the question “How far shall we go?” is that you can go too far, that removing the symbols of the Confederacy from public life would somehow sanitize history. But this ignores evidence that the white South had already created an elaborate “Lost Cause” mythology to go along with its imposition of Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow rebuilt southern society keeping southern blacks “in their place”; the Lost Cause mythology provided moral cover. After all, if such an upright and inspiring father figure as Robert E. Lee—just observe his handsome features and noble bearing astride his stalwart warhorse “Traveler”—then how could the cause for which he fought be other than good and noble? 

In this context the Confederate flag in its various modern forms, the statues of Robert E. Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, the many monuments to the brave defenders of (fill in the blank) who died for the Cause, the schools and buildings named for Confederate heroes collectively conspire to maintain the illusion that the Southern case for war was noble and righteous.

But the hard, cold truth is it wasn’t, any more than Robert E. Lee--the focus of the South's idolatry--was a paragon of honor. As David Brooks points out in a recent op-ed, Robert E. Lee was a West Point graduate and career Army officer who took an oath to defend the United States, not the state of Virginia. His decision to join the Confederacy was not preordained. His sister Anne Marshall was staunchly pro-Union. His wife Mary Ann Lee reportedly preferred that Virginia remain in the Union and would have supported his decision either way. 40% of his fellow Virginian military officers opted to remain with the Union, notably Winfield Scott, who served as Lincoln’s first Army chief-of-staff. Unlike most of the foot soldiers who followed him into battle, Lee had a real choice in the matter.

It's curious today that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are perceived as romantic warriors, imbued with almost mystical powers, whereas Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, the generals who won the war for the North, are often maligned as barbarians who invented "total war" and inflicted it on the South.

Reputedly Lee was a reluctant slave-owner. While this may be true, after inheriting his wife’s family estate “Arlington” in 1857, he kept the estate’s 195 slaves in bondage another five years, releasing them only after the maximum period stipulated by his father-in-law’s will. Again, he could have freed them forthwith, but chose to keep them in slavery to preserve the estate.

In her recent book “Galileo’s Middle Finger,” Alice Dregor recounts a trip with her immigrant parents to Poland in 1990, just as the Soviet empire was crumbling. A crowd gathered as a large statue of Lenin in the center of Gdansk was ostensibly being moved to a “safe location.” The crane lifted the statue up and then unceremoniously dropped it on the ground with predictable results. The crowd broke out the vodka and broke into song. No one worried that they might be whitewashing Polish history, they just celebrated being free.

We can admire Lee and Jackson as skilled battlefield leaders without turning them into demigods. Instead, in a kind of collective intellectual laziness, we have become enthralled by a self-serving Southern-apologist version of American history, where both sides can claim the moral high ground. It’s past time to push back assertively. Get rid of the special license plates, drop the Confederate holidays, change the names of high schools, and banish the Confederate flag in all forms from public grounds. (I can accept an exception for museums and battlefields.)

As for the multitudinous statues and monuments, I am content to leave most in place, and let their significance fade with the passage of time (as with most war memorials). But there are a few that even today give particular offense, and these should be moved to a "safe location." The city of Memphis, a predominantly African-American city, has reported already voted to remove the statue and grave of Nathan Bedford Forrest from a city park that bears his name. Senator Mitch McConnell and other Kentucky politicians have called for removing the statue of Jefferson Davis from the Kentucky state house, where it now stands a few feet from the statue of fellow Kentuckian Abraham Lincoln. I suspect there are others that deserve a similar fate. Unlikely as it is, should the Georgia National Guard choose to direct a "live fire" artillery exercise at the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, I would go witness the event, then break out the bourbon and break into song..."Glory, glory, hallelujah..."

[1]  Best estimates are 12.5 million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves between 1680 and 1866. Only about 500,000 slaves went to North America, the rest shipped to other countries in the Americas, most notably the Caribbean and Brazil. The mortality rate during the Middle Passage was 10%-20%. Do the math and the U.S. part of the slave trade accounts for about 80,000 slave deaths. The Equal Justice Initiative documented 3,959 lynching deaths in the South between 1877 and 1950.