Every week, 8,000 new people apply for unemployment.

That’s what the U.S. Labor Department said Thursday in a report — “The Employment Situation — June 2012″ — issued one day before the official unemployment rate for July is announced. That is expected to stay at 8.2% for the general population nationwide — despite the addition of 100,000 new jobs last month.

But among Hispanics, the rate jumps to 11 percent.

People who have been out of work for an extended period of time during this economic crisis, have a harder time rejoining the workforce, according to the George Washington University School of Media’s “Face the Facts” initiative.

That may be why more Americans are out of work for six months or more — 6 million, or the combined population of both Houston and Los Angeles — for longer periods of time than they have been in more than 60 years.

In 2011, the percentage of unemployed who were jobless for six months or more was 43.8 percent. More people were counted as “long-term unemployed” last year in 2011 than at any time since the government started keeping records in 1948.

For those out of work for a year or more, the chance in any given month of finding a new job dwindles to less than 10 percent, the GWU research found.

Forbes magazine reported last month that long-term unemployment has doubled under President Barack Obama’s administration. The number of long-term unemployed reported in July by the  Bureau of Labor Statistics increased more than 100 percent, to 5.3 million, than when Obama took his oath of office in January, 2009, when there were 2.6 million people unemployed for more than 6 months.