The recession has made adjusting to life in the U.S. difficult for refugees, as even younger refugees struggle to find work. But it is particularly tough for those who cannot work — which is why SSI payments are so important. The extension was available to elderly refugees — 65 or older — or the seriously disabled who fled persecution in their native countries and have little or no income or assets in the U.S.

The system was designed so the elderly and disabled could receive benefits until they have been in the U.S. enough time to become naturalized citizens and receive government support. The naturalization process is supposed to take five years, but backlogs have led to some refugees losing benefits before they are eligible for other help. Congress attempted to solve this problem by temporarily extending refugees’ SSI limit in 2008, to nine years for those actively pursuing citizenship. But a recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warns these extensions will begin to expire Oct. 1:

“Congress should act quickly to avert the severe hardship that this small but vulnerable group would face,” the report states. “Lawmakers should also consider going beyond temporary stopgap measures and adopting permanent legislation that recognizes these refugees’ unique circumstances.”

House Ways and Means Committee Chair Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) had introduced the bill, H.R. 5618, to extend UI through Nov. 30 and retroactively grant benefits to those who started losing them at the beginning of June. By the time the Senate acts, approximately 2.5 million people will have stopped getting unemployment checks.

Levin released this statement on passage:

Earlier today, a Republican Member of this House spoke on the plight of millions of unemployed who are losing their unemployment insurance, saying, he came to the floor with a heavy heart. I think the unemployed in America welcome heavy hearts, but if there isn’t a helping hand, a heavy heart doesn’t work.  Those who are still unemployed should not suffer due to the indifference of Republicans in Congress.

I want to list very briefly the basic facts for everyone to consider and for all of our country to hear: 1.7 million unemployed workers, unemployed through no fault of their own, looking for work, will have lost their benefits by the end of this week.  By the end of next week, without further action, 2.1 million will have lost their benefits.  By the middle of July, when the Senate can address this issue again, 2.5 million will be without this basic assistance. The average unemployment insurance in this country is about $300 a week, roughly half of the previous wage on average. For a family of four that average check is only 74 percent of the poverty level.

These basic facts should refute the notion that those who are unemployed, who would have no benefits, are not looking for work.  Indeed, the reality is very clear.  For every job available there are five unemployed workers. This issue is fundamentally an emergency for our country and our economy. Unemployment benefits have been considered, and passed as emergency spending under both Democratic and Republican Congresses and Administrations.

I cannot understand how anyone could come to this floor and say for 1.7 million people and their families this is not an emergency. There is no excuse for voting no.  It has been noted that the Senate is out of session.  We must pass this so it is the first item of business when they return. The only reason this extension has not passed the Senate in recent days is because there could not be found more than two Republicans to vote for this extension. That is a shame and it is shameful. This House needs to lift that shame off of the shoulders of everyone in this institution and pass this bill so that millions of American workers get the benefits they earned and deserve.

June’s rise in private employment was the fifth consecutive monthly gain. However, over these five months the increases have averaged a modest 34,000. Recent ADP Report data suggest that, following steady improvement through April, private employment may have decelerated heading into the summer. The slow pace of improvement from February through June is consistent with other publicly available data, including a pause in the decline of initial unemployment claims that occurred during the winter months.

Unlike the estimate of total establishment employment to be released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), today’s ADP Report does not include the effects of federal hiring for the 2010 Census. Hiring for the census may have peaked in May. For this reason, Friday’s figure for the change in nonfarm total employment reported by the BLS might be weaker than today’s estimate for nonfarm private employment in the ADP Report.

All of this bodes terribly for tomorrow’s big jobs report, wherein the Labor Department will update the national unemployment rate. The economy needs to add 100,000 jobs to keep up with growth in the labor force, and 200,000 at least to cut into the unemployment rate. Census hiring has peaked, and most economists are predicting low numbers.

Last week, thousands of Americans who have exhausted their unemployment insurance — the 99ers, named after the maximum number of weeks of state and federal benefits — sent letters and petitions to Washington as part of a futile campaign to convince the Senate to pass a bolstered version of the jobs bill, now stalled and being pared back. There were many common themes in their stories, but one of the more surprising was age.

[Economy1] One woman from Warren County, New Jersey, wrote: “I am (or was) a legal secretary with several years of experience (30+ years). … I have applied to jobs that are more than one-half less than what I was earning. I search for a job each and every day. … Where do people in my age bracket go? Too young not to work but too old to work?”

Such stories of older workers too young for retirement but struggling for months if not years to find jobs have policy experts concerned as the recession drags on and long-term unemployment continues to rise. Experts say that age discrimination is severely compounding the jobs crisis for older workers, although the phenomenon is difficult to quantify or to prove, and remains under-examined by the government. This time, it is not just making it more likely that these workers will be laid off. It is also making it much harder for them to gain new positions.

Last week, a hearing called by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights examined the issue, attempting to determine whether part of the reason older workers have such trouble finding work, on aggregate, is due to employer biases out of their control. The unemployment rate is a comparatively moderate 7.1 percent for workers over the age of 55 — it’s 9.7 percent nationally — as older workers are more likely to retire early or leave the workforce if they lose their jobs. But that hides the troubling reality for those who can’t afford to leave the labor force.

The unemployment rate for over-55s is at the highest level since 1948. Since the recession started, both the number of older people seeking work and the rate of unemployment for over-55s have increased more sharply than for all other demographic groups. And older workers comprise a high share of the long-term unemployed. In May, the average duration of unemployment for older job-seekers climbed to 44.2 weeks, 11 more weeks than the national average. Nearly six in ten older job-seekers have been out of work for more than six months.

There are structural reasons that the unemployment crisis is hitting older Americans so hard. Older workers are more likely to be underwater homeowners, unable to sell their house and move away. They often have highly specific marketable skills, and seek positions more selectively. They also often have skills rendered obsolete by the recession, in outdated trades. But too often, employers illegally presume that older workers will be harder to train, more likely to leave for other positions, less productive, less technologically able or less willing to move — and do not hire them for those reasons.

Laurie McCann, a senior attorney at the AARP Foundation Litigation and expert on age discrimination, explains that the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act requires employers to assess candidates as individuals and not to make assumptions about their abilities or requirements due to their age. “Employers have legitimate concerns about older applicants,” she says. “But the problem is, we find that people aren’t even getting in the door to have an interview or have their resume looked at, because employers assume that older workers aren’t looking for a job at a lower salary or aren’t willing to relocate.”

Dianna Johnston, assistant legal counsel to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, explains that the statistics fail to capture this side of the picture. Speaking before the Commission on Civil Rights, she said, “Most labor-force statistics don’t really tell us much about the labor force. But one does. … Older workers remain unemployed one to three months longer than [younger workers]. And that is partly attributable to discrimination.”

McCann called age discrimination in hiring “the most under-reported form of discrimination” and “prevalent” throughout the recession, as an average of 5 workers compete for every job opening. In an interview, she explained why age discrimination is so hard to quantify: “[It is] the lack of proof. If you’re laid off, you might be in outplacement, and see that everyone who got laid off was older. Or, you might have friends in your office to tell you that a younger person took your job when your employer told you the position was being eliminated. But hiring discrimination is much harder to see, and can be impossible to prove. In most cases, you’re not going to know who was hired. You’re not going to know how they filled the position. There’s just a hunch, or a feeling, that you’re not getting through the door because of your age.”

Incidences of age discrimination in firing are much clearer to see, and have risen along with the recession. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says age discrimination cases have jumped 17 percent since the start of the recession, and climbed 30 percent between 2007 and 2008. But virtually all of those cases involve layoffs, rather than the lack of job offers.

Still, evidence of age bias in hiring is accumulating in academic research and anecdotal reports to the EEOC, Commission on Civil Rights and AARP. In one famed 2005 study, a Texas A&M economist sent out 4,000 job applications for entry-level positions. (The resumes were only women’s.) Older workers were 40 percent less likely to receive a response back. And of the letters sent to Congress last week, a vast majority mentioned age, many coming from older workers who had applied for hundreds of positions, to no avail.

“Who will help the over 50 population find work? I have been out of work, laid off from the military/defense industry and apply to anything and everything I am qualified for, but with no luck,” one wrote. “ I am told I am too qualified and when I respond with, ‘I am willing to take this position, take less money, I will give you my experience at that salary,’ I am still turned away.”

Unfortunately, policy experts fear that age discrimination in hiring, compounded by the recession, is a problem without a solution. Individuals can bring cases against individual companies, but discrimination is virtually impossible to prove, even if it is easy to see as an aggregate phenomenon. Plus, McCann says, explains, the phenomenon is so prevalent that discrimination simply seems like reality. “As a society, we’re willing to tolerate age discrimination, more so than other kinds of discrimination,” she argues. “People sense that, and it gives older job-seekers a sense of futility. Why even bother applying for jobs, or bringing a discrimination case? I won’t win.”

For every day a person is out of work, not only does he and his family suffer from the effects of lost income, but the chances of his finding work diminish. And, unusually in this recession, long-term employment has not just hit retirement-age or very young workers, but every demographic class.

The number of long-term unemployed persons poses a serious policy problem now, though one Congress seems to have answered: It will not extend unemployment benefits any longer than 99 weeks in some states, but will likely continue funding extended unemployment benefits as stimulus. But the issue will also pose a serious policy problem in the future: What will Congress do if, five years from now, with the recovery well underway, there remain millions of people who simply cannot find work? Job retraining programs and hiring incentives present one partial solution, but if Congress continues to tighten the nation’s fiscal belt, such expensive programs might not be politically feasible.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) (WDCpix)

Most state unemployment programs are flat broke, according to federal analysts, and the states themselves are largely to blame.

Thirty-four state unemployment insurance trust funds have run dry as a result of the recent recession, forcing those programs to take out nearly $40 billion in federal loans to weather the storm, the Government Accountability Office revealed this week.

[Economy1] The crisis is no accident, experts argue, but instead represents a failure on the part of many states to build up a funding cushion during the good years that could see them through the bad. Unemployment taxes levied on employers, many contend, have simply been too low to provide that insurance.

“Long-standing UI tax policies and practices in many states over three decades have eroded trust fund reserves,” Andrew Sherrill, the GAO’s workforce director, told House lawmakers on the Ways and Means Income Security subpanel Thursday.

Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group, echoed that message. “States,” he told the committee, “entered this recession far less prepared than they had entered any of [the] recent recessions over the past 35 years.”

The insolvency trend could have far-reaching ramifications, experts warn, threatening the capacity of struggling states to help jobless workers through the next recession. The trend also raises broader questions about how the UI system is funded. Sherrill told lawmakers that the funding formula is ripe for an overhaul.

“The long-term decline of UI funding, culminating in widespread borrowing by state trust funds and the dire financial condition of the program, raises critical questions about the ability of the program to function as it has in the past,” Sherrill warned. “Now is the time … to consider changes to federal program policies that could better assure the long-term financial structure of UI trust funds.”

The trouble, many experts say, is this: State UI programs — which provide 26 weeks of financial help to laid off workers looking for new jobs — are funded with a tax on employers. Yet states are given broad discretion to set their own rates, and in recent decades, they’ve drastically scaled them back. Indeed, between 1978 and 2008, Sherrill said, the minimum state UI tax rate on employers fell from an average of 1.14 percent to an average of 0.37 percent, relative to taxable wages. By contrast, the federal UI tax is an across the board 6.2 percent on the first $7,000 of wages.

“This is the single most important reason why so many state trust funds are insolvent today,” Stettler argued.

There’s another key factor contributing to the problem: The eroding wage base. That is, while states must establish a taxable base income of at least $7,000 (the federal standard) — and while many states go much higher than that — only 17 states index that base to wage inflation. It only makes sense that those states that are taxing a higher proportion of wages tend to have money remaining in their UI coffers. Indeed, NELP estimates that the insolvent states have an average wage base of $9,500, while the figure for solvent states is $20,500.

Some lawmakers are already eyeing the problem. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), for example, blasted the ill-prepared states Thursday, arguing that they “ignored one of the basic rules of any insurance program, which is to save money in good times to pay out more during hard times.”

Not that the states are solely responsible for ensuring the solvency of the state UI programs. The GAO noted several reforms that Congress could enact on a national scale. The $7,000 federal wage base, for example, established in 1983, isn’t indexed to wage inflation. Doing so would force a number of states to hike their own taxable wage bases, which in turn would yield larger UI pools during periods of economic growth.

McDermott, who chairs the income security subcommittee, hinted Thursday that Congress would play a role in the reform process. “The question that will increasingly confront Congress is whether we can help states suffering from huge deficits in their UI funds, while also encouraging them to take the steps necessary to ensure a strong and solvent unemployment insurance system in the future,” McDermott said. “I think the answer is yes.”

Not everyone on Capitol Hill agrees. Rep. John Linder (Ga.), the senior Republican on the Ways and Means subpanel, blasted the notion that hiking UI taxes is the answer to the current insolvency crisis. That idea, he said, “is just the latest example of Democrats’ desire to never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

“They will use state insolvency caused by the recession and their failed trillion-dollar stimulus law to argue for even higher federal and state unemployment taxes, forever.”

Reacting to a rising tide of anger from gay and lesbian supporters at a series of slights and deferred promises, President Obama will tomorrow extend some benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.

The move, which begins to mirror the policy of many large corporations, will have an immediate effect for many workers, but it is a deeply reactive response to a core Democratic group whose concerns have been festering for six months. The presidential memorandum  — scheduled for signing [Wednesday] at 5:45 p.m., may in the short term, give Joe Biden something positive to say at a June 25 fundraiser that has seen prominent guests drop out, a host sharply attack the administration, and which is expected to be marked by protests.

However, the Defense of Marriage Act prohibits the federal government from extending health and retirement benefits to same-sex couples, so the benefits are more likely to be marginal — like relocation assistance.