A couple of days ago I mentioned that the share of foreign born workers in the US had accelerated a bit over the past two years. This was largely because the number of native born workers had flattened out, and I wasn't sure if this was due to native workers being pushed out of the labor force or just because of boomer retirements.
It's the latter. Here's the labor force participation rate for prime age workers:
For native born workers, the prime age participation rate is higher than it was before the pandemic and higher than it's been since 2002. Nobody's been pushed out of the labor force by foreign born workers.
NOTE: The BLS doesn't make it easy to find this information. They also provide data only by ten-year age bands, not for age 25-54, so the numbers I used are averages of the three age bands from age 25 to age 54. Here's the raw data if you don't trust this whole averaging business.
Kevin, for weeks I've been arguing with a friend who is convinced jobs are being taken away from native-borns and given to immigrants. Could you add to either of your graphs, or maybe graph separately, the participation rates for the older bands, showing them going down? It's implied in what you've shown, but it would help to see it explicitly.
If the "jobs being taken away" narrative were valid, we should be just as fearful of children growing into adulthood and entering the workforce as we apparently are of immigrants entering the workforce. A worker is a worker.
I'm a little concerned about Harris getting too deep in the policy woods during the next debate, but I'm wondering if when Trump spouts that jobs are going to foreign workers Harris simply responds by saying the % of native born workers in the work force is as high today as anytime in the last 20 years. Would that work?
Would that work?
Work to do what? Convince hardcore MAGAts to vote for her (unlikely) or convince loyal Dems to vote for her (unnecessary)?
I find it pretty unlikely that anything policy-related is going to make much of a difference during the debate—if the debate itself is even impactful, which has yet to be seen (I think the evidence suggests most of the time they don't mean that much).
Overall vibes and candidate comportment—and hopefully a major gaffe or two on the part of Donnie—are what might make a difference, in similar fashion to what transpired between Trump and Biden in June.
Do those charts separate the foreign born workers by if they are citizens, here on work visas, or not documented?
Frankly the only immigration issues bellowing out of Il Duce's pie hole in next Tuesday's gladiator match will be that Harris's is to blame for the masses of illegals spilling through the border, who are all, or course, murder's, rapists, and thieves.
I sure hope the MAGA folks are going to volunteer their children and grandchildren to take over the jobs vacated when Trump exports 10 million undocumented people from the US. I don't believe my son living in San Diego and employed as an engineer in tech nor my other son living in the east coast and working in IT are likely to take up the slack.
How much of the MAGA merch is made in China?
Your chart is better than anything AI would come up with if I asked. AI is at a loss now for current data to provide accurate answers and it's going to be tough row for it to catch up. Also, what's up with Gen-X slackers? Not saying it wasn't rough for those babies, but, sheez, time they all got out there and got a job, one-way-or-another, lack-of-skills-notwithstanding, nor privilege.
Speaking only for myself, as a 57 year old born among the first years of Gen-X, I don’t see any slackers of my cohort. I have been rejected for a lot of jobs because of my age. I have also been rejected because nobody in my long-time field in this state knows me (long story, very boring). So, I took the only job offered to me. Working in a local factory for a large, multinational corporation. I can feel my skills atrophy day by day as no one cares what I may know or be capable of doing. It is severely enervating and the rotating shift schedule is exhausting. Plus, I have to work a LOT of overtime to meet our expenses. So I’m sure you were offering some quality snark, but the job market leans heavily toward youth. And don’t get me started on stupid management strategies. 🙄
You would expect labor force participation to begin to dip as people enter and proceed through middle age. Some of that is health-related. And some of that is wealth related (ie, they can afford to retire). The GenX number doesn't really tell us much juxtaposed against younger cohorts. A more meaningful heuristic would be comparing them to previous generations at a similar age.
It should be noted that at the start of the decline of the 45-54 line (2009) all of those people are Boomers, not Gen-X. That decline is likely early retirements.
I look forward to the time when I no longer participate. 2 years.
Just to check, you weighted the average by the number of people in each group? Otherwise it won't have worked properly.