As more Americans lose their jobs, the U.S. government is actively
discouraging the recruitment of foreign workers, from dude ranchers and
fruit pickers to lifeguards and computer programmers. Full article in WSJ.
In the NYT, Casey Mulligan points out how that preventing foreigners working to save American jobs is as absurd as the "marriage bars" which proliferated during the Great Depression. These prevented married women getting jobs, or led to women being fired when they got married. But since then, as the share of women working has soared, the share of men working has remained unchanged.
There isn't a fixed number of jobs to go around. Women don't take men's jobs, and immigrants don't take local workers'. Full article here.
Graph of the share of men not working together with men “unemployed” 1948-2008:
http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2009/01/misleading-nature-of-unemployment.html
Hardly constant, but I agree with you the cause is unlikely to be women employment rise.
The most potent form of protectionism ever invented is the so called “intellectual property” equivalent to infinite tariffs for decades or centuries: it costs so many jobs and it’s insanely inefficient, destroying the otherwise free market. Yet no one is talking about that, go figure.