“#BlackLivesMatter”?: Only about 5% of black teen male dropouts from poor families are employed, according to this 2013 interview with economist Andrew Sum. That doesn’t mean a 95% unemployment rate — many aren’t in the labor market all. Still. Sean McElwee of Demos calls it “one of the most viscerally jarring statistics I’ve ever read.”

Teenage employment used to be higher, Sum notes. Why did it collapse?  One reason, he says, is that after the 2001 recession, the jobs that teenagers had once gotten instead went to “older workers & immgrants.” Less skilled, younger, and black workers are typically the people most adversely affected by the arrival of lower-skilled immigrants — this is just a pointed example of that general rule of thumb. It’s simply astounding that a president of Obama’s declared sympathies would, when faced with this situation, want more immigration to fill the jobs that poor black teenagers used to get. What’s he going to tell them? ‘Go back to school’?** School hasn’t helped them, and the payoffs from school are far off in the future. A job would have an immediate payoff. And work itself is socializing. It can succeed where public schools fail. In a tight labor market, employers would have to compete to figure out how to bring marginal workers into the mainstream economy.

I would bet on market ingenuity over public schools. But first, the easy path — importing desperate hard-working Third Worlders to fill employer demand — has to be closed off, at least temporarily. …

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** — That’s basically what he tells workers who lose their jobs due to trade (who also tend to be less skilled).  “[W]e’ve got to provide help to transition, and to re-tool and adapt …” It’s easier to say that to people who’ve been in the work force. It’s less likely to be effective advice for teenage dropouts who’ve never been part of the mainstream economy. How do you “re-tool” when you haven’t tooled in the first place? Wouldn’t it be good to have a decent supply of jobs that don’t require “tooling” at all?

Pay to Play? National Journal has just announced an event, “Pathways to Reform: A Discussion on High-Skilled Immigration Policy.” Underwritten by Qualcomm, which of course has a corporate interest in increasing the supply of high-skilled immigrant labor. That’s a not uncontroversial position, given the unemployment rate among skilled current residents of the U.S.. Yet of the seven “key stakeholders and experts” on the panel, I count seven supporters of more high-skilled immigration, and zero skeptics. Should be a “robust discussion.”

I have several friends who work for the National Journal and Atlantic.  They’re usually sticklers for ethics. So I ‘d ask them: Isn’t it corrupt of National Journal to seemingly rent out to Qualcomm not only the prestige of its name, but its credibility — as if this panel represented the real diversity of national opinion on the issue, in National Journal’s estimation. (If that really is their estimation, Lord help them.)  It’s also amazingly unsavvy of Qualcomm’s D.C. office not to take the risk of including even a token dissenter on the panel. Is their argument that weak?

I always thought the Atlantic/National Journal model was to have a reasonable panel, plus a bonus corporate lobbyist panelist who happens to have contributed to the bottom line. This seems different — an entirely artificial, hermetically curated event, a fake debate. …

Once dunned twice shy, baby: Here’s the New York Times quotation of the day, from Hillary advisor Harold Ickes, who is apparently having trouble finding “Democratic donors who can give $5 million or even $10 million each” to a pro-Hillary SuperPac (which would be formally independent of the official Hillary campaign):

“Our side isn’t used to being asked for that kind of money. If you asked them to put up $100 million for a hospital wing, they’d be the first in line.”

Hmm. Why might Ickes find it hard to recruit rich Democrats for a SuperPac to elect Hillary in 2016? Maybe because rich Dems were pushed into giving millions to Ickes’ unofficial PAC (the Media Fund) to elect a Democrat in 2004 –– remember the “mandatory” meeting of Hollywood libs? — and felt the money was largely wasted. It certainly didn’t elect John Kerry. Early on, Ickes even got in a sniping match with Kerry’s official campaign — the sort of SuperPAC  vs. candidate discord that may be our best hope in a Citizens United world, but that the donors might fail to appreciate. A hospital wing probably seems a better bet. …