This post is a follow-up to my earlier post this morning. According to the Census Bureau the working age resident population in the United States can be divided into three cohorts, roughly equal in size: ages 20-34, ages 35 to 49, and ages 50 through 64. That last cohort corresponds roughly to Baby Boomers (rather arbitrarily the Baby Boom is considered to have taken place from 1946 through 1964 so the oldest of the middle cohort are Baby Boomers, too). I’ve already documented that Baby Boomers have higher levels of educational attainment and have realized higher incomes throughout their working lives than the cohorts that followed them.
Contrary to what you might anticipate from reading the NYT article I cited in my earlier post, the unemployment rate is significantly lower than in either of the younger cohorts. Indeed, the unemployment rate for those 50 to 64 is lower than the unemployment rate for those 35 to 49 and the unemployment rate for those 35 to 49 is lower than that for those 20 to 34.
Older workers tend to stay unemployed longer than younger ones. This is both because it can be harder for an older worker to find a job and because older workers keep looking for a job longer than younger workers do and, consequently, don’t fall into the category of “discouraged job-seekers” so quickly. The reasons usually given for this include fewer options for further education or otherwise obtaining credentials and reduced alternatives for otherwise dropping out.
I think that the role that foreign born status plays in unemployment is a legitimate one. I find it terribly difficult to ferret out the statistics. Most of those gathering statistics have an agenda and the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not generally break out employment by native/foreign born status.
In most OECD countries the unemployment rate for foreign-born workers is higher than for native born ones. I see little reason the U. S. should be much different.
I’m not certain of this but it may be the case that immigrants and the children of immigrants constitute a larger proportion of the youngest cohort than they do of the others. When you combine that with the lower rates of educational attainment among immigrants and the children of immigrants (the high school and college dropout rate of foreign-born Hispanics is extremely high) and the LIFO phenomenon I’ve mentioned previously it wouldn’t be surprising if they constituted a number of the unemployed disproportionate to their numbers in the population.
