The Wall Street Journal has this headline in today's paper:
How Immigration Remade the U.S. Labor Force
That's true enough, but it's also worth noting that it hasn't remade the workforce all that much—not recently, at least. Here's the number of foreign-born workers in the labor force:
This is all foreign born workers, both legal and illegal. It's currently exactly on its pre-pandemic trend, which suggests the recent surge in illegal border crossings has had little effect.
At the same time, it's worth noting that the share of foreign born workers has grown at an increased rate over the past year or two. This is largely because the number of native born workers has been pretty flat compared to just before the pandemic. This may be due to boomers retiring, but I'm not sure.
Well, when your goal is to diligently fan the (roaring) flames of racism in the Republican Party, a little -- how does the Felon put it? -- "truthful hyperbole" goes a long way.
And right now, racism -- in particular but certainly not exclusively anti-Latino racism -- is the coin of the realm among Republicans, and if there's anything the Journal knows about, it's coin.
I don't understand the covid drop. We really had 4 million foreign born workers go back to their origin country? If true it seems like an underreported story. So Trump could accurately claim to have reduced foreign born labor by millions, while accusing Biden of allowing an increase of 8 million?
Kevin is apparently showing employed persons , not workers or persons of working age. The total employed underwent similar variation:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1tpD7
The missing foreign-born were still here, they were just not employed, like many native-born.
The total shows a tail-off, consistent with the fraction of foreign-born increasing.
Simple logical ezplanation I missed. Thanks.
I think it's very likely that it is due to a demographic crunch. I have been seeing predictions of a demographic crunch and a shortage of workers for about right now for a long, long time. So we are getting foreigners (who soon will not be foreigners ar all, but Americans, because that's how that has worked as long as we've had an America) to take up the slack.
End of story. Nobody's job is being taken by foreigners. Unless, you know, they were fired because the committed 34 counts of felony fraud or something.
As a "foreign-born worker" myself, I'd like to see a chart comparing the economic contribution of the foreign-borns vs the natives. Normalized for share of workforce, of course.
"surge" is a straw-man. Are some people complaining about a surge, or complaining about an overall high -level?
I think you're missing some of the latest evidence on this Kevin. BLS surveys aren't picking up stuff that's showing up in CBP reports. The CBO has been updating its projections a lot to reflect a pretty massive spike in 2022/2023: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59899#_idTextAnchor005
Kevin wasn't discussing projections, and I'm not sure why you think he should.
I'm having a hard time reconciling a surge in immigrants with a linear increase in working immigrants.
Is the raw number of workers meaningful? Shouldn't we look at this as a fraction of all workers?
So the percentage of foreign workers increased 50% in 15 years while the overall population increased <10%. And that increase is likely concentrated in a few sectors. Seems pretty surge-y to me.
Remember how you used to cut off some of your charts at 2020? Well, when your conservative doppelganger does the same to that foreign born worker chart, it looks like a massive surge.