Like average incomes, job creation may be becoming polarized in the US

This from Rakesh Kochhar of the Pew Hispanic Center, as quoited on NPR's Morning Edition today:

"There is research suggesting that more and more, the U.S. economy is creating jobs not in the middle of the skill spectrum but more at the low end and the high end," he says. "People are calling this 'job polarization."
Here's the whole of his press release from the Center's website:

After the Great Recession:
Foreign Born Gain Jobs; Native Born Lose Jobs

by Rakesh Kochhar, Associate Director for Research, Pew Hispanic Center, with C. Soledad Espinoza, Intern, Pew Hispanic Center, and Rebeca Hinze-Pifer, Intern, Pew Hispanic Center
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In the year following the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million, according to a new analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Department of Labor data by the Pew Hispanic Center.

As a result, the unemployment rate for immigrant workers fell 0.6 percentage points during this period (from 9.3% to 8.7%) while for native-born workers it rose 0.5 percentage points (from 9.2% to 9.7%).

The 2009-2010 recovery for immigrants, who make up 15.7% of the labor force, is also reflected in two other key labor market indicators. A greater share of their working-age population (ages 16 and older) is active in the labor market, evidenced by an increase in the labor force participation rate from 68.0% in the second quarter of 2009 to 68.2% in the second quarter of 2010. Likewise, a greater share is employed, with the employment rate up from 61.7% to 62.3%.

These gains occurred at a time when native-born workers sustained ongoing losses. The native born engaged less in the labor market (labor force participation rate fell from 65.3% to 64.5%) and a smaller share was employed in the second quarter of 2010 than in the second quarter of 2009 (58.3% vs. 59.3%).

But the jobs recovery for immigrants is far from complete. The 656,000 jobs gained by immigrants in the first year of the recovery are not nearly sufficient to make up for the 1.1 million jobs they lost from the second quarter of 2008 to the second quarter of 2009. Over the two-year period from 2008 to 2010, second quarter to second quarter, foreign-born workers have lost 400,000 jobs and native-born workers have lost 5.7 million jobs. The unemployment rate for immigrants is still more than double the rate prior to the recession when it stood at 4.0% in the second quarter of 2007.

Also, even as immigrants managed to gain jobs in the recovery, they experienced a sharp decline in earnings. From 2009 to 2010, the median weekly earnings of foreign-born workers decreased 4.5%, compared with a loss of less than one percent for native-born workers. Latino immigrants experienced the largest drop in wages of all.