Over 200 Million People are Unemployed Worldwide.

Marina Primorac writes:

Today’s job market demands more specialized skills, but migration and technology are helping—not hurting—chances of high-quality employment, according to the March 2015 issue of Finance & Development (F&D) magazine..

Over 200 million people are unemployed worldwide. No surprise then that some fear immigrants and robots will take the jobs they so desperately need. But obstacles to immigration—geographic, linguistic, and bureaucratic—mean the share of migrants has remained stable since 1960 at about 3 percent of the global population. The limited globalization of the labor force means large wage gaps persist between countries that send migrants and those that receive them; migration has little impact on wages.

Migrants often get blamed for flooding the job market, but the World Bank’s Çağlar Özden writes that they rarely take jobs from natives. If anything, they tend to nudge local workers into higher-skilled and better-paying jobs—as managers for example. Low-skilled migrant workers offer household help that allows educated women to work while their children are young.

Immigration does create jobs, with migrants performing the jobs natives are either unwilling or unqualified to perform...

Nor can joblessness be blamed on technology, says James Bessen of Boston University. Sometimes new technologies eliminate jobs altogether, but his research finds that technology today creates demand for different capabilities, displacing workers to different jobs that require new skills. 

Only in advanced economies’ manufacturing sectors are jobs being eliminated—and these losses are offset by new jobs in other sectors. For example, the introduction of automatic teller machines in the United States led to more branches being opened, resulting in no fewer teller jobs but more branch manager jobs.

    -RW