Mark Krikorian points to a study by Steve Camarota and Karen Zeigler, of the Steve Camarota and Karen Zeigler, showing that all net employment growth since 2007 has gone to immigrants, nationwide.  Krikorian emphasizes that immigrants aren’t to blame for seeking opportunity, but policymakers are, for failing to match immigration to national economic needs.

A quick Monday morning search didn’t turn up sufficient data to repeat the research easily for Rhode Island, but a couple of sources give an indication that the story is much the same, here.  The table at the end of this Tennessee iteration of the report shows that Rhode Island’s labor force participation rate for U.S. natives fell from 80.1% in 2000 to 75.6% in 2014, a 5.6% drop, while the native employment rate fell from 76% to 68%, a 10.5% drop.

Historical data for all Rhode Island employment puts those rates at:

• Participation: 66.7% to 65.1%, a drop of 2.4%
• Employment: 64.0% to 60.0%, a drop of 6.3%

We’d have to know the percentage of native versus foreign-born people in Rhode Island to figure out the actual numbers.  Rhode Island’s terrible employment situation for the past seven years also makes the numbers a little more muddled than the national scene.  Be that as it may, it’s clear that foreign-born Rhode Island workers are making gains versus U.S. natives in Rhode Island — at least when it comes to having a job.  Otherwise, the native-born population would be doing as well as or better than the overall population.

It makes intuitive sense that Rhode Island would share the nation’s problems, and that they’d probably be worse, here.  After all, the economic policies pursued by the Obama Administration — including loose money and loose immigration — have fostered economic disparity, with the upper crust prospering and everybody else on the decline, including the working and middle classes.  Rhode Island’s ruling class likes to amplify all of the bad decisions made by its national counterparts, so we can be expected to be doing even worse.