In my February 6th column I quoted the blogger at Zero Hedge on the dire state of the white-collar labor market. [ Fired Before Hired: How Corporations Rigged The Job Market And Killed The American Dream , by Daniel Drew, Zero Hedge, January 28, 2015.]

This drew an email from a reader in SW Virginia, quoted here with permission, slightly edited.

When I read your most recent gift to VDARE, it was déjà vu all over again, as the old saying goes. I … have done a lot of volunteer work the last 10 years after retiring from a career in IT. I am clearly with you and VDARE on the immigration issue, but my email deals mainly with how hard it is to get a not-very-glamorous office job.

I was occasionally asked to help enter job applications into the HR system of a local government when they were exceedingly numerous and the deadline was near. For a pretty good office job, we could get over 100 applications, all pretty much local people, most fairly young. My experience in entering these applications mirrored those of Eric Auld [i.e. in the Zero Hedge piece]: I’d see numerous applications from MA’s or BA’s for a job paying a bit over $8 an hour to shelve books in the local library. Educational requirements rarely exceeded HS and were so stated in the ad for the job.

I did this work out in an open area where I was accessible to anybody who came along so I often got a question about the applications. The run-away favorite from hopeful applicants was this: How many applications do you have for this job? The more I had, the lower their faces fell.

My experiences have led me to 3 conclusions: