During a recent video chat session, President Obama told a woman that he could not understand why her engineer husband was unemployed because “industry tells me that they don’t have enough highly skilled engineers.” However, data from the American Community Survey collected by the Census Bureau show that there are a total of 1.8 million U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who are either unemployed, out of the labor market, or not working as engineers. This is true for those with many different types of engineering degrees.
The 2010 American Community Survey shows:
- There are 101,000 U.S.-born individuals with an engineering degree who are unemployed.
- There are an additional 243,000 U.S.-born individuals under age 65 who have a degree in engineering but who are not in the labor market. This means they are not working nor are they looking for work, and are therefore not counted as unemployed.
- In addition to those unemployed and out of the labor force, there are an additional 1.47 million U.S.-born individuals who report they have an engineering degree and have a job, but do not work as engineers.
- President Obama specifically used the words “highly skilled.” In 2010, there were 25,000 unemployed U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who have a Master’s or PhD and another 68,000 with advanced degrees not in the labor force. There were also 489,000 U.S.-born individuals with graduate degrees who were working, but not as engineers.
- Relatively low pay and perhaps a strong bias on the part of some employers to hire foreign workers seems to have pushed many American engineers out their profession.
- There are many different types of engineering degrees. But unemployment, non-work, or working outside of your field is common for Americans with many different types of engineering degrees (View detailed employment figures for specific types of engineers).
- The key policy question for the United States is how many foreign engineers should be admitted in the future. Contrary to President Obama’s statement, the latest data from the Census Bureau indicate there is a very large supply of American-born engineers in the country. It would be better for the president to seek more diverse sources of information than simply relying on “industry” to determine what is going on in the U.S. labor market.
Data Source: Figures for the above analysis come from a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the public-use file of the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Figures on degrees and employment are based on self-reporting in the survey and have been rounded to their nearest thousand. The survey asks about undergraduate degrees, so some of the individuals who have a Master’s or PhD may not have their graduate degree in engineering. Also, those who indicated that they have a “professional degree” are not included in the discussion of those with Master’s and PhDs because a large share have law degrees. The 2010 data is the most recent ACS available.
The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent non-partisan research institution that examines the impact of immigration on the United States.
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My husband works for a local engineering and construction firm. In 2009, Numerous people with both engineering and construction management degrees with several years of experience were laid off, including my husband. The work just stopped coming in. The company has rebounded somewhat. My husband was hired back. While he was unemployed we had to pull thousands out of savings to pay the mortgage, bills and groceries. A friend of ours who lost his construction management job at a competing firm had to go out of the country to find work. Obama is out of touch. He’s never had to work for anything in his life.
O B U M E R is just plain CLUE LESS on anything he is involved in.
He does not even know how many people have actually run out of unemployment and just flat out stopped looking for work.
Time for him ” The ANNOINTED ONE ” to just get out of town NOW. His TERMINATION is coming in November of 2012.
It is obvious that BO is clueless. American engineers of all kinds have been being replaced by H1B immigrants, and it has been being done since the early to mid 90′s. It is one of the most understated conspiracies in American business. It includes government contractors, technology companies, etc. Virtually anyone over 50 in the I/T industry has been personally hurt by this process. Companies don’t hire American. They lay off over-50′s, sponsor H1B’s, and if they can’t do that, export the job out of the country.
The other place it is done is with medicine. The AMA has a strangle hold on controling the number of doctors graduating through American programs. They keep the number low to very low, and instead, health care providors import doctors from out of the country with H1B’s. What we should be doing is expanding the number of doctors coming out of American programs, updating both what is taught and treatment protocols to reflect modern technology.
Her husband is unemployed because he is not in the union. The union echelon hires and fires these days, not the owner(s), the rules and regulations imposed by the government is strangling businesses and has caused many businesses to fold or leave the country. The lowly union worker doesn’t realize he is being played, his dues that he pays is suppose to help in the event of loss of work or retirement, and the union would have more for that individual if they weren’t giving away $100′s of million to the democrats. The AFL-CIO is trying to create a global union, where everybody has the same salary, but to even the field the American worker has to take less and global worker will get more. Redistribution on a larger scale, Obama’s dream not the American Dream.