Tags
CCP Virus, Center for Immigation Studies, coronavirus, COVID 19, immigrants, Immigration, Karen Ziegler, Labor Force Participation Rate, labor shortages, LFPR, prime-age population, productivity, Steven A. Camarota, Trump administration, wages, workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy
Thanks to the non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), one of the biggest and most harmful recent claims about the American economy has been exposed as a sham: that the current shortages of labor about which employers keep whining are due to a shortage of immigrant workers spurred by the Trump administration’s restrictive policies and worsened by the CCP Virus pandemic.
As known by RealityChek regulars, the very idea of a chronic labor shortage – as opposed to the kinds of temporary supply and demand mismatches that occur regularly in every market-based economy – is un-serious mainly because the solution typically is so simple: raise wages enough to attract new employees. And standard labor shortage claims tend to be harmful because they’re usually covers for business demands for more mass immigration – which enables them to keep wages down rather than respond by investing in labor-saving equipment and improving efficiency in ways that boost productivity and therefore benefit the entire economy, especially long term.
But leaving such broader considerations aside, CIS, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, has demonstrated that blaming immigration restrictions for all the Help Wanted signs that do indeed seem to be appearing all over the country is simply wrong on its face. According to a December 22 CIS study by Steven A. Camarota and Karen Ziegler, the biggest culprit by far is a continuing decline in the number of U.S.-born residents of the country looking for work.
The authors use Census data to show that although the number of immigrants (legal and illegal) working in America did fall from 27.8 million in November, 2018 (the Trump-era peak) and 27.7 million the following November (just before the pandemic arrived in the United States), by last month (the latest available) data, it was back up to 29.6 million. So there the immigrant worker population has not only recovered all of its pre-pandemic losses. It’s 1.9 million greater than its pre-CCP Virus level.
More important statisically speaking, that November, 2022 immigrant worker number is above the level it would have reached had this population’s growth trend going back to 2000 simply continued uninterrupted.
Meanwhile, the number of U.S.-born U.S. residents in the workforce has continued its long-term decline despite a modest rebound from pre-pandemic lows. The standard measure is the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR), which shows the share of working-age Americans are either on the job or looking for one.
The LFPR for all U.S.-born residents of the country fell from 77.3 percent in November, 2000 to 74.1 percent in 2019, dropped further in pandemic-y 2020, and has only bounced back modestly as of November, 2022 to 73.5 percent. And the post-2019 fall-offs for the most closely followed groups – “prime age” men and women, defined as the 25-54- year olds – have generally been steeper. As a result, the number of U.S.-born Americans at work now is 2.1 million smaller than in November, 2019.
In fact, Camarota and Ziegler calculate that if the total U.S. LFPR today was the same as in 2000, 6.5 million more U.S.-born residents would be either working or looking for work today. That’s 3.42 times more than the number of foreign-born residents who have been added to the working population during the pandemic era.
So whatever labor shortages have been experienced lately have been home-grown – and unrelated to immigration restrictions. And if the business community and others favoring more immigration were really interested in easing them meaningfully, they’d be spending more of their time figuring out how to attract more U.S.-born residents to the workplace. That wouldn’t boost national productivity or wages. But the social benefits of ending idleness and welfare dependency in the working-age population should hardly be ignored.
Unfortunately, as Camarota and Ziegler write, the push to fill the gap with immigrants both threatens to keep the native-born on the occupational sidelines and increase their vulnerability to crime, addiction, mental health issues, and obesity, as well as to “reduce political pressure from employers and society in general to address” the domestic LFPR decline.