Policy Briefs
Policy Brief # 12-1 | February 2012
Since the economy of the United States slid into recession in mid-2008, the monthly unemployment rate has hovered between the high-6 percent range to the mid-9 percent level. It is the most protracted period of high unemployment that the nation has experienced since the depression decade of the 1930s. The rate for August 2011 was 9.1 percent — the same as for the month before. Worse yet, the unemployment projections by the Obama Administration indicate that there is no expectation that the annual rate of unemployment will fall below 8.5 percent until at least 2014. [Lee, p.1] In human terms, the August unemployment rate translates into 14.0 million unemployed workers. Throughout this troublesome period, however, the nation’s immigration policies — which have been under criticism for over 40 years for being at odds with the nation’s labor market trends — have remained untouched by policymakers. Annual immigration levels have remained at historically high levels without any seeming notice of the economic downturn affecting the economy.
Vernon M. Briggs, Jr.
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Policy Brief # 11-4 | November 2011
The Day of Seven Billion and the World’s Most Overpopulated Nation
The Day of Seven Billion, the day when United Nations demographers believe the planet will attain a population of seven billion people, occurred on October 31, 2011. Global population growth, and the problems associated with it, deserve more publicity and acknowledgement than they usually get. But so does population growth in the United States, a topic that many living in the United States need to better understand if for no other reason that we sometimes assume overpopulation is solely a problem of developing nations.
Kathleene Parker
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Policy Brief # 11-3 | August 2011
As Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan famously quoted, “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job; a depression is when you lose yours.” By those definitions, one in 10 Americans would consider the current economic status to be a depression.
Tyler Seuc
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Policy Brief # 11-2 | August 2011
U.S. Immigration Throughout History
It is often said that the United States is a country of immigrants. This is for the most part true: only Native Americans have the right to claim they were here first. European settlers and indentured servants, as well as slaves brought from Africa, were the first to immigrate to North America, setting the foundations for what would later become the United States of America.
Keely MacDonald
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Policy Brief # 11-1 | January 2011
Hey Buddy, Can You Spare A Job
With real unemployment cresting beyond 20 percent and a budgetary meltdown that portends either a grim austerity program or bankruptcy — or both — a crowded and collapsing California foreshadows the nation’s new normal. A journalist goes down and out in the formerly Golden State in search of those “jobs Americans won’t do”.
Mark Cromer
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Policy Brief # 10-2 | August, 2010
The Politics of Immigration Reform and How Progressives Fit In
Margaret Sands Orchowski, Ph.D.
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Policy Brief # 10-1 | March, 2010
Leon Kolankiewicz
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Policy Brief # 09-2 | December, 2009
The Economic Impacts of Mass Immigration into the United States: And the Proper Progressive Response
Phil Cafaro | Colorado State University
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Policy Brief # 09-1 | January, 2009
Vernon M. Briggs, Jr. | Cornell University
