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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.