After a stretch of depressed immigration levels — primarily driven by Donald Trump’s hobbling of the legal immigration system — the number of immigrants coming here began to rebound mid-2021. Immigrants are more likely to be working-age than native-born Americans, so their arrivals helped solve a number of problems facing the U.S. economy.
For instance, some of our pandemic-related supply-chain woes were related to worker shortages in critical fields such as construction and food processing. An influx of new workers helped fill those vacancies and unsnarl stuck supply chains. In other cases, immigrants have been willing to take jobs that native-born Americans are unwilling to do, such as the backbreaking work of harvesting potatoes, building homes and caring for the elderly. They’re also filling high-tech positions that Americans cannot do because there are insufficient numbers of us with the necessary skills. And they are creating entirely new job opportunities by launching new businesses — something immigrants do at much higher rates than the native-born.
And then there are the jobs we native-born Americans might theoretically be willing and able to fill, but there simply aren’t enough of us around to fill them. The arithmetic is clear: Boomers are retiring and U.S. birthrates have plummeted. Absent immigration, the U.S. working-age population would be either flat or soon shrinking.
As a result, all of the new job growth since the pandemic, on net, has been due to foreign-born workers. That is, if you stripped away immigrants, there would be no more people employed today than was the case before covid.
On many dimensions, our ability to attract global talent to our shores is a blessing. But this being an election year, and demagogues being demagogues, right-wing pundits and political operatives have worked to darken these bright statistics.
Fox News refers to Bidenomics as a “migrant job fair.” The Republican-aligned Heritage Foundation alleges that “Americans have been completely left behind in this economy,” citing as evidence that fact I just mentioned: that all the net new job growth is accounted for by immigrants.
But the labor market is not zero-sum, and native-born workers happen to be doing extraordinarily well, too. In fact, the share of native-born Americans considered “prime working age” (25 to 54 years old, so after traditional college-going years and preretirement) who have jobs is higher than it was pre-pandemic. There just aren’t enough of us, in total, to fill all the jobs that employers are creating as boomers retire.
It’s true that overall, native-born Americans are less likely to be in the workforce today than in years past, but that’s entirely due to aging.
To put a finer point on it, there’s so much demand for workers now that even the most marginal American workers, such as teenagers and people with disabilities, are doing unusually well in the labor market. Ironically, some parts of the country complaining loudest about immigration today are the same places trying to loosen limits on child labor because their worker shortages are so acute.
It’s almost like there’s a simpler, more mutually beneficial solution at hand.
Some other countries would love to have the problems we have — to have so many talented people clamoring to replace retiring boomers (or care for them) and to infuse their economies with new skills, ideas, businesses and drive. The influx of new talent has not only helped us beat recent recession predictions; it’s also helped us best our competitors in Asia and elsewhere, where demographic challenges are dragging on growth. The U.S. economy is one of the only places in the world right now that is doing even better than expected before the pandemic began.
And, if current immigration trends continue — which they might not, depending who wins in November — immigration is likely to boost our fortunes in the years ahead: The Congressional Budget Office recently revised upward its 10-year gross domestic product projections by $7 trillion, attributing the increase to immigration-driven labor force growth. Our longer-term fiscal challenges also look better, since immigrants pay taxes and are much less likely than native-born Americans to (ever) qualify for benefits, including programs such as Medicare and Social Security.
Yet, somehow, the Trumpy right argues that greedy, freeloading immigrants are simultaneously stealing both our jobs and our precious tax dollars. In reality, they’re beefing up both.
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