Teen Employment: Another Casualty of Mass Immigration
May 14, 2010
by Wais Hassan
During the past year a number of recent reports have been published about the staggering level of teen unemployment during this Great Recession. The issue even became a cover story of TIME magazine last January. Analysts from across the political spectrum argue that the dire employment prospects that teens currently face will have dire consequences for both the American economy and for teens most severely affected by the phenomenon. The number of employed American teenagers declined by nearly 25% between November 2007 and November 2009. Andrew Sum, of Northeastern University, found that job loss in relative terms is greater for teens during this current recession than for all workers aged 16 and over during the Great Depression.
A new study by the Center for Immigration Studies called, “A Drought of Summer Jobs: Immigration and Long Term Decline in Employment Among US-Born Teenagers,” presents a compelling argument that immigration is partially responsible for the precipitous rise in unemployment for American teenagers. It is important to bear in mind that declines in teenage employment among blacks, whites and Hispanics are almost identical and that significant declines occurred for youths from both high-income and low-income families.
The CIS study concentrated on summer months, where teen employment is most common. Teenagers and immigrants tend to concentrate in the same low-skill occupations. On average, 20.2 percent of immigrant workers (legal and illegal) occupy one of the top-10 teenage occupations. Additionally, the total number of immigrants working in the summer doubled from 11.6 million in 1994 to 23.2 million in 2007. American teens were most likely crowded out of certain occupations due to the high concentration and massive increase of immigrant labor in the US. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that teenage labor participation was significantly higher in the 10 states where immigrants are the smallest share of the labor force compared to the 10 states where immigrants were the highest share of the labor force.
It is likely that immigrants displace teenagers because the large majority of immigrant workers are adults who have substantially greater work experience. Some researchers have disputed this correlation and point to other political phenomena like welfare reform as a more likely factor in driving teens out of the workforce. The TIME article mentioned above pointed to higher rates of employment for older Americans (50 and above) at service jobs as the major contributing factor to teen unemployment. Both trends definitely have an impact on teen unemployment but it would be foolish to rule out immigration as a major explanatory variable to teen unemployment, considering the huge influx of immigrants into teenage occupations.
While some Americans may think that teen employment is not something policy makers should be overly concerned about, mounting evidence by academics demonstrates that teen employment has significant bearing on later adult outcomes. Tama Leventhal, Julia Graber and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn of Columbia University sample low-income African American youths from inner-city Baltimore and find that the subset of teens who did not work during their high school years are significantly more disadvantaged than those who did work. They even found that early entry into the workforce leads to a greater chance of completing high school. Christopher Rhum, in a 1997 study, finds that the benefits of high school employment apply to both middle class and lower income students. Seniors who worked 20 hours per week earn approximately 22 percent more annually than seniors who did not work and non-college bound teens who worked 20 hours a week earn about 20 percent more than teens not attending college who did not work.
