For every open construction job in America, there are more than 20 people lining up to apply.

Few statistics illustrate the gravity of the U.S. recession as clearly as the yawning gap between job seekers and vacancies, highlighting the struggle President Barack Obama has had to contain job losses since he took over in January.

Research by Andrew Sum, a labor economist at Boston's Northeastern University, shows that the ratio of unemployed persons to job openings has widened in America to 5.7 to 1 in August of this year from 1.2 to 1 in December of 2000.

Job seekers filed 10,000 applications over three days with General electric for 90 openings paying about $27,000 a year building washing machines, General Electric spokeswoman Kim Freeman said Thursday.

GE advertised the jobs Sunday, and began accepting applications and resumes solely via a company website Monday. Wednesday was the deadline, she said.

The number of foreign-born residents of the U.S. declined for the first time since at least 1970, as a recession and tight labor market dented America's image as the land of opportunity.

A decline in construction jobs lured fewer immigrants from their home countries, especially those from Mexico, according to the Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey.

The number of immigrants applying to become U.S. citizens plunged 62 percent last year as the cost of naturalization rose and the economy soured, according to an analysis released Friday by the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy organization.

In late 2007, the application cost increased from $330 to $595, plus an $80 fee for computerized fingerprinting. Partly in anticipation of the price increase, 1.38 million people filed applications in 2007, creating a backlog that nearly tripled the average processing time.

Last year, the number of applicants fell to 525,786, the smallest since 2003. The largest was 1.41 million, in 1997, just before a 76 percent fee increase.

In 1996, Congress decided that it needed a way to track people who overstay their visas — a huge and understated part of the nation's illegal immigration problem. So it authorized a program to verify that visa holders who arrived in the country eventually left it.

Five years later, on 9/11, terrorists tragically confirmed that program's failure by flying hijacked airplanes into buildings. Two of the 19 hijackers had overstayed visas. In the years that followed, the newly created Department of Homeland Security initiated what it called the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program (or US-VISIT for short) with much fanfare.

The flow of immigrants from Mexico to the U.S. declined to the lowest level in a decade during the past year, a sign that the recession is deterring economic migrants from heading north in search of jobs.

However, there is no evidence of an increase between March 2008 and March 2009 in the number of Mexicans returning home from the U.S., according to an analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center, an independent research group in Washington.

It's been nearly four months since the U.S. began accepting from employers H-1B visa petitions for IT and other professionals for temporary jobs starting in fiscal 2010, which begins Oct. 1. The weak economy continues to dampen demand of the visa most popular among employers seeking IT workers.

Since the U.S. began accepting fiscal 2010 visa petitions on April 1, the U.S. has hit about two-thirds of the annual cap on general H-1B visas. At last count, as of July 10, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had received 44,900 H-1B visa petitions toward the congressionally mandated annual cap of 65,000.

While use of the visa in the private sector at companies like Microsoft is well-known and hotly debated, less is known about school districts' use of the program. In fact, at least 40 Washington school districts have applied for H-1B visas to employ teachers and staff over the past five years.

With many forecasters projecting unemployment to remain above 10 percent next year and not return to pre-recession levels of roughly 5 percent for years after that, Obama is likely to be confronted with defending the effectiveness of his economic policies as the nation endures its worst employment situation in a generation.

Analysts say the high levels of joblessness would be accompanied by increases in child poverty, strained government budgets, and black and Latino unemployment rates approaching 20 percent.

The turmoil ravaging General Motors and Chrysler generated big jumps in joblessness last month throughout the Midwest, sending Michigan's unemployment rate above 14 percent and pushing three nearby states into double digits.

Jobless rates in Illinois and Indiana surpassed 10 percent, while Ohio's approached 11 percent, according to data released Friday in a Labor Department report.

When asked about what governments should do to address illegal immigration, 83% of respondents supported stronger border controls, 74% supported cracking down on employers, and 68% supported deportation.

Twenty-six of respondents are angry over immigration policy in the United States.

Sixty-two percent say gaining control of the borders is more important than legalizing the status of undocumented workers.