A Crazy Time for Unemployment, Nuance and Third Person Politics

How bad has the recession been for Latinos? It’s been bad, we know.

While unemployment hovers around 9.6 percent for the nation, the Latino unemployment rate is 12.4 percent.

But there’s a deeper story, not in terms of who has it bad, but of who has a job. The Pew Hispanic Center reports that immigrant Latinos have seen job growth while native-born Latinos haven’t. As a prelude to mid-term elections the conclusion is startling.

The Christian Science Monitor has a good piece about the report, and it breaks down the numbers:

• In the year following the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers posted a net gain of 656,000 jobs, while native-born workers lost 1.2 million. The foreign-born category includes legal and illegal immigrants.

• As a result of immigrants’ recent job gains, the unemployment rate for immigrant workers fell during this period from 9.3 percent to 8.7 percent, while for native-born workers it rose from 9.2 percent to 9.7 percent. For both groups, unemployment remains far above where it stood before the recession.

There’s more, it’s a good read. And it begs a larger consideration.

A few things to consider:

First, the statistical fact that immigrant Latinos are employed more than native-born Latinos ignores the qualitative analysis; what type of jobs do immigrants have?  Granted, in this economy any job is better than no job. But the working condition of immigrant laborers (regarding safety, hours and pay) is less than that expected by the citizen labor force.

And second, how does this play in politics? CNN recently reported unemployment rates this way:

If you look at those percentages and correlate them to mid-term election polls you’ll find that those most affected by the recession are less likely to vote for right-wing, Tea Party change.

This is a crazy political year where even the nuance at the granular level makes little conventional sense.  Immigration has surfaced as a polarizing issue, but it seems that those least affected by the  immigration issue are the more strident anti-immigrant proponents. The Christian Science Monitor raises these questions: “Are immigrants (including many in the country illegally) reducing employment opportunities for native-born Americans? And are immigrants pushing down wage levels?” You could easily say yes, on both counts, for native-born Latinos. So where do Latinos stand?

We know that the majority of Latinos support immigration reform that provides paths to citizenship and stops all manner of state laws that mask profiling and discrimination. But polls show that Latinos are more than likely to take a pass on this election. Are you wondering why?

Listen to the rhetoric and read the polls.

Doesn’t it all come across as if Latinos are in the room and everyone is talking about them as if they were a child or a sick grandparent? The thing about third person politics is that the third person rolls his/her eyes and wishes they’d all leave the room.