This chart has been making the rounds from immigration hawks:
This seems damning, but I knew there had to be something dodgy about it. I just didn't know what. So I started poking around in the numbers.
The first thing I did was check that the figures in the chart are correct. They are (using the household survey employment levels). And yet, we know the unemployment rate among the native born is better than it was a year ago. How can that be?
The answer turns out to be simple: the native-born adult population has declined over the past year:
Since last summer the adult population of the native born has gone down by nearly a million people. The series is noisy, so the month-to-month figures are going to bob up and down, but generally speaking the past year has been a period when the native-born population has been shrinking and therefore the number of native-born workers has also been shrinking.
This has nothing to do with illegal immigration. It's solely because the native-born population has flattened out:
The growth rate of the native-born adult population slackened in 2021 and then turned actually negative about a year ago.
Why? These are adults over age 16, so the population depends solely on (a) the number of 15-year-olds who turn 16 and (b) the number of people who die. The US death rate has subsided from its COVID peak and is now only a bit higher than it was in 2019, so the overall population decline this year has to be due mostly to a change in the native-born birth rate around 2008. And sure enough, the US birth rate started to plummet right about 2008. What we're experiencing now is an echo of the Great Recession.
But did the Great Recession affect native-born women more than foreign-born women? No. In fact, it hit the foreign born harder. Presumably, the foreign-born population has made up for this via immigration, legal and otherwise.
Illegal immigration might explain a small bit of the continued increase in foreign-born workers, but the decline in native-born workers shown in the top chart is due solely to population decline, not difficulty finding work. The percentage of the native-born population that's working is about the same as it's been for a long time.
pedantic: left y axis is millions
Sure to prompt another round of nativist wailing that (white) women need to stay home and start having more babies. Ignoring that it's incredibly difficult to be a single income household with housing prices and everything else skyrocketing.
If you want more (white) babies you need to do something about housing costs, food costs, healthcare, and pre-school costs. People aren't having kids because they can't afford to. The corporate overlords don't care since they can import more workers who already have families and fleece them in exchange for a piece of the American Dream.
So, once again the "business wing" of America is fully at odds with their greatest electoral supporters.
People can’t afford those things because wages and salaries for the ‘99%’ have not kept pace with productivity gains in recent decades, as they did in the postwar period until the Reagan administration. The Federal government has more levers to change this than it does to restrain prices — minimum wage, protections for the right to organize, rules for federal contracts. Congress needs to act to raise the minimum wage, and while Biden has used executive authority in the latter two areas, Congress can strengthen laws protecting unions, workers, and particularly workers on government contracts.
Retirees aren't employed either....
Ok, many have to take jobs.
Boomers are moving on up
To the sky....
You hear lots of people, both naturalized and nature-born citizens often saying that "illegal" citizens should play by the rules, too. So I would like to ask those folks:
What if we made it 100% legal for anyone to become a naturalized citizen, so long as they pass a background check?
Is it really about what is "legal" and "illegal", or is it something else?
Gosh, I wonder what that "something else" might possibly be? Eeez a puzzlement!
That said, most Americans haven't the foggiest fucking clue how complex, expensive, and time-consuming the "legal" immigration route is. The fact is, for most of the migrants showing up at the southern border there is, in effect, no reasonable legal immigration path. You can't just walk into a US consulate and go "Hi, I'm Miguel. I'm an unemployed laborer and would like a visa, por favor!"
I think it goes beyond race. I think a large part of it is a widespread sense of entitlement.
"This seems damning, but I knew there had to be something dodgy about it."
If it was making the rounds in right-wing media, that goes without saying. Can they make *any* argument anymore without lying? About anything?
+1
Wait, you mean employment numbers actually indicate that immigrants support our economy? Who coulda knowed?
The US fertility rate dropped below replacement level (2.1) in 2008 along with the baby boomers starting to retire/die in droves. The only way the population could continue to grow is through immigration which means more foreign born workers. Of course the point of the chart was not to state the obvious.
+1
The drop in birth rate is the same trend as in Japan, South Korea, Russia, China, Mexico, just about everywhere really. Countries with high immigration can hide this, Kevin has teased out the underlying fact. There is a book called Factfulness that gives a great overview of this and the general global improvement in health and so on. It lines up well with Kevin's general point made elsewhere that things are generally better than people understand.