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Unemployment & Immigration. A telling piece on unemployment statistics and the black market in labor. Quotable:

"The number of people on formal payrolls remains low because new jobs tend to be ones that don't show up on payrolls. Employment gains are among the self-employed and contract workers, or in the informal "gray" and "black" labor markets. People are doing temporary day work or contracting that's kept off the books. These don't tend to be highly paid jobs or jobs with benefits like health insurance, and they are often performed by immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants .. The numbers suggest that native-born workers — particularly teenagers and young adults without college degrees — are being displaced by new immigrants. Indeed, last year the employment rate for teens reached a record low, down 9 percentage points since 2000. These are the very people who might benefit from the unskilled jobs now going to foreign workers .. Large increases in unskilled immigrant workers have helped fuel real-wage declines at the bottom of the labor market and increased earnings inequality .. The proposed guest-worker program will expand supply in an already oversupplied labor market, foster the further development of a substratum outside of existing laws and customs that regulate employment, and further diminish the chances of teens and other young adults, especially from low-income and minority communities, to get valuable work experience .. ".

Off-shoring, the black market in labor, overseas production -- all of these are measures folks in the non-government sector are taking to opt-out from taxes, regulations and lawsuits imposed by the American government sector. The folks getting screwed are the only folks without the protection of free and unregulated trade -- overtaxed, over regulated American workers. There is a 20 - 40 percent tax tariff on American workers seeking to contract with American business. The regulation and tort tariff on the American worker must add another 10-20 percent on the anti-American worker tax penalty laid upon the back of the American employee. With this huge trade wall of tariffs blockading free trade between American business and American laborers, no wonder American labor is becoming the sick man of world trade.