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October 16, 2024 - 8:00pm
The vast majority of labour force growth in the US is driven by immigrants, a new report has found.
According to research published by the National Foundation for American Policy, foreign-born workers were responsible for 88% of workforce growth since 2019. In addition, the report projected that immigrant workers will comprise the only source of US labour force growth after 2052.
Without immigrants and their children, the US workforce would have shrunk since 2018, according to the report. Fewer than half a million US-born workers were added to the workforce in the past five years, compared to 3.6 million foreign-born workers. Further, foreign-born workers have accounted for more than half of workforce growth in each of the past three decades.
The US-born population is seeing slowed growth, while a large cohort of older Americans are ageing out of the workforce, NFAP found. At the same time, both legal and illegal immigration are increasing. Proponents of immigration tout foreign-born workers as a key to economic growth, particularly in light of the demographic trends of native-born Americans.
Public opinion, meanwhile, is turning against immigration, with deportations and lower rates of immigration seeing a massive uptick in popularity since 2020. On the Right, the GOP’s long standing scepticism of immigration has married Trump-era populists’ concerns about American workers. Trump has pledged to slash illegal immigration through enhanced border patrols and mass deportations, and he’s expressed a desire to curtail some legal residency programmes, such as those used by Haitians to obtain legal status in Springfield, Ohio.
Recently Democrats have also been taking a harder line on immigration. While Kamala Harris advocated for abolishing ICE in 2019, she is now campaigning as a border hawk and touting her prosecutorial experience with drug traffickers in campaign ads. She has said little about deportations in her 2024 campaign, instead calling for pathways to citizenship. She has stated that her views are the same as Biden’s, and said that “unauthorized border crossings are illegal.” She supports legislation which would restrict the asylum process when border crossings are higher than 1,500 per day.
The report touted increased avenues for legal immigration as the answer to the projected decline of the US workforce and a means of preventing illegal immigration. “Immigrants and the children of immigrants are essential sources of population and labor force growth,” it read. “Future workers are vital to servicing U.S. debt and other existing obligations.”
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SubscribeUnlike a lot of people here, I strongly support legal immigration. As the author stated, we need immigrants to bolster the workforce because of an aging population. But open borders is insanity. It drives down wages and creates vast social problems. A big fail for the author is he neglected to mention that 7 million American men – just men – have dropped out of the workforce altogether. Many of these people would be working if businesses were offering a living wage.
Immigration needs to be targeted and high value. If companies can’t attract workers then they should have to offer training, better pay and working conditions until they can rather than claiming there’s a “shortage” and going crying to the government to allow them to import cheap labour from abroad.
We’ll see just how many of these companies are actually needed if they have to start paying their staff a wage they can live on
JD Vance did a podcast with the NYT on the weekend. She said one third of American construction industry jobs were being done by illegal immigrants. No doubt these workers are being paid garbage wages in an industry that has long supported workers making an above average salary – wages you could raise a family on. This is nothing more than profiteering on the backs of the working class.
But Vance and most Republicans don’t support greater Union rights and worker protections. Isn’t it just classic of deflection onto migrants and insincere at best? And of course Trump blocked the Border deal too.
No it’s classic capitalism – simple supply and demand economics. Businesses need workers. If there’s a shortage they’ll have to pay more to get them.
I don’t think they are particularly opposed to unions either. The border bill was a joke, allowing a minimum of 1 million illegals a year, which is higher than any other total outside the Biden years.
I think it is fundamentally a demand problem disguised as a supply problem. In advanced (Western) economies, much of the surplus is not invested back into productivity but flows to enormous asset bubbles, for example, in real estate and big finance. That suggests weak demand in the real economy and possibly also a serious misallocation of the current labor force.
I don’t think a lot of readers disagree with immigration. Quite the reverse. What we want is controlled immigration. We have enough unskilled, lazy people in this country.
We don’t need to add to those numbers by letting in complete strangers, who we have no idea of their skills, education or intent.
By controlling immigration, we can select those with skill sets that help this country.
it’s called common sense. I don’t understand why the left are so against that reasoning
foreign-born workers were responsible for 88% of workforce growth since 2019.
I find it hard to get my head around this issue. Does this figure mean there were a huge number of jobs just waiting to be filled? That employers could not find anyone to employ until immigrants came along. And the shrinking workforce is who? So is it suggesting, or proving, that US workers are refusing to work? Growth in the the workforce; what sort of jobs does that mean? I understand the idea of immigration and how immigrants create new business, but I don’t understand the workforce growth thing at all.
It’s the total number of people working. Employment opportunities and people refusing to work will have an impact – as will various other factors – but the most significant factors are birthrates in the US and retirement. Each year a bunch of young Americans enter the workforce but a bunch of old Americans leave it by retiring. These numbers will be fairly similar for a birthrate around 2.
By contrast, the number of migrants who come to work each year is way higher than the number of migrants who are retiring. Therefore in terms of how the total number of workers goes up, migrants have a far bigger impact than US born workers.
Employment opportunities and people refusing to work will have an impact
But the opportunities are there if immigrants are working. Are people refusing to work? Who are they? How do they get by financially? What are the jobs that have increased the workforce by 88%? Did people leave those jobs and not return or are they new jobs?
I agree with you, that the figure is meaningless. The implication to me is that there are more workers, of which a greater number are immigrants (is that legal or illegal).
However what jobs do these extra workers do? Are they skilful jobs. If the majority are jobs consisting of delivering fast food, then all it means is that the work force is increasingly becoming more unskilled, as the economy becomes more service-oriented rather than skill-based.
All the really skilled jobs will be handed over foreign workers or machines.
Is that what the Americans want for their country?
I’m in UK but it’s odd how until the late 1990s in fact in UK corresponding with the coming into power of Tony Blair there weren’t enough jobs to go round..
Every job had surplus applicants. We were constantly told by the (UK) media of how hard it was to find a vacant job. There were 3:,million unemployed and it would have been six.milion.but for putting them on the Sick. I see now this is how they play us. Media image shapes our reality. Then suddenly we were getting an influx of Polish and they were all finding jobs. Why were there suddenly numerous available jobs? And it’s NOT because Brits were lazy and not prepared to work hard..All those jobs that suddenly were out there HAD NOT BEEN,it’s like they were deliberately kept back and held for the migrants
And that’s the thing the Right who weaponise immigration don’t tell you – migrants are servicing your debt and allowing you to age with protections and support.
Now it can be better managed, and must be legal not illegal, but conversation needs to rapidly mature. US and UK need significant immigration or the wheels will come off a heck of a lot more than the fantasy Right want to tell you.
That’s the thing. We need immigration. It’s the open borders that are a problem. How is it even possible to manage an influx of 20,000 people into a town of 60,000 in five years? Housing, health care, education and social cohesion are ripped apart. How can anyone think this is a good idea? Open borders have actually reduced support for legal immigration, which might be the most damaging long-term impact.
The UK has added around 7.5 million people over the last 30 or so years. Tax and debt keeps on going up while productivity and general well being goes down.
And what’s been the growth in pensioners AR? And what age group is predicted to grow by further 20% in next 10yrs and 60% in next 25yrs? How you paying for this demographic change?
By importing another 7m people who never grow old JW, obviously (sarcasm).
It’s not simple is it, which why you avoided answering. The issue is how we balance the demographics so we have sufficient contributing.
You could have said, pension age goes out to 70+ quite quickly and inheritance tax etc becomes much higher to balance costs of managing greater old age proportion.
Even then some immigration inevitable, but it can be less if the Right actually starts to engage honestly in the challenge.
You’re the one not addressing the issue. It’s simply not sustainable, the dishonesty lies entirely with you.
Migration for which there is demand has historically been beneficial. However, since these figures are from 2019 I guess it is relevant to consider the possible (transient) impact of Covid policy. Also in recent years some articles have empirically studied the impact of both population decline and aging that did not find the expected effect on, for example, GDP per capita. One way to explain this is that there is not so much a shortage of labor as a shortage of workers doing the things that actually need to be done. Another explanation is the impact of automation and innovation in the absence of cheap labor.
Low wage low skilled migrants barely earn enough to pay tax. They qualify for benefits and bring a huge capital cost (housing and welfare).
They are not paying anyones pension nor debt repayments. Pensioners are paying more tax to fund their costs.
And yet, despite massive population increases, the debt continues to get more massive by the hour. Why? Because the vast majority of people are a net drain on the system, including immigrants. The vast civilisational destroying Ponzi scheme of de-facto open borders is like a drug addict injecting themselves just to get the body moving for a few more hours.
Legal immigration is exactly the same. Bring in enough poor people and GDP goes up – but debts go up even higher. Again, it’s exactly like a drug addict, descending into ever greater states of addiction and decline.
But at least the parasites get their interest payments.
but any American talking of a great replacement is called a conspiracy crank.
Because they will do shit jobs for crap wages.
Legal immigration is crucial to the US and is one of the country’s competitive advantages as it allows us to source labor inputs from all over the world.
On the other hand, illegal immigration is a drag on our economic system with many illegal border crossers are net takers of resources which only weakens the US economy.
Kamala Harris’s comments on the importance of immigration policy is a misdirection by her to make the voters think she is strong on the border, but in reality, immigration policy, although it is related to border crossing, it is a very separate issue then border security. You can have a broken immigration system, but still protect the border and not allow illegals to cross the border and release them into the interior of the country.
Harris, as Border Czar, has decided to allow the border to be wide open and allow millions of illegal crossing (as many as 10 million during her administration) which not only is an economic drag to our economy when you factor in government give aways to illegals, as well as creating a national security issue as thousands of terror watch list people cross into this country.
Harris has blown it at the border, made us all less safe and she must own her failures.