We keep hearing that the U.S. economy, especially the job market, is strong. At first glance this seems right — after all, the unemployment rate has been below 4 percent for more than two years. However, when we look closer at the data, things aren’t so clear-cut.
My colleagues Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler did their own analysis of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “household survey” and found that, compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, right before Covid hit, the number of immigrants employed (legally and illegally) is up 2.9 million through the fourth quarter of 2023, while 183,000 fewer native-born Americans are working. Employment for both groups has obviously rebounded since the shutdown-driven lows of 2020, but it hasn’t fully recovered for the U.S.-born, while the number of immigrant workers has exploded.
What is perhaps even more interesting is that the labor-force-participation rate of U.S.-born men without a bachelor’s degree remains below the pre-pandemic level, which was already very low by historical standards. “Labor-force participation” means that one is either working or has actively looked for work in the previous four weeks (from which the government also calculates the “unemployed”). So if you’re not working and haven’t looked for a job in the previous month, you’re not “unemployed” as far as the government is concerned.
The figure below shows the share of “prime age” (25–54) U.S.-born men in the labor force, by education level, in the fourth quarter of the years of 2000, 2006, 2019 (which were the employment peaks of their respective business cycles), and 2023. Labor-force participation has declined steadily for those without a college degree. Even though labor-force participation goes up as the economy expands, each peak has been lower than the one before.
In fact, in the 1960s, more than 90 percent of men without college degrees were in the labor force. Few men in this age range are in college, and the biggest declines are among those who are unmarried and do not have children. (Unlike women, men generally do not care for young children when they’re out of the labor market.) Such a large share of less educated Americans on the economic sidelines is not what one would expect in a “booming” economy.
The long-term decline in labor-force participation is no secret. Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men without Work may be the best-known examination of the issue, but it has been extensively studied by academics, the Brookings Institution, the Obama White House, the Federal Reserve, and many others. All this figure does is update the data.
Immigration is by no means the sole, or even main, cause of this. There are many likely causes for the decline in work among less educated native-born men, including overgenerous welfare and disability programs, low wages for those at the bottom of the labor market, the decline in manufacturing, and others. But we know that, of the 2.9 million additional immigrant workers in this data, 60 percent do not have a bachelor’s degree and therefore compete for the same jobs. And it’s likely that at least half of these less educated newcomers are illegal aliens.
Some will be tempted to say, “If Americans won’t work, then bring in immigrants who will.” But Americans who aren’t in the labor force don’t just disappear from society. There are serious social problems associated with being disengaged from the world of work. A number of studies show a link between not working and crime as well as mental-health issues and failure to form families. So-called deaths of despair, including suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholism, are also much higher among those not in the labor force. Putting aside the moral obligation to our fellow Americans, the enormous number of men on the economic sidelines affects all of us negatively.
It’s obviously not as simple as saying that every job taken by an immigrant is one lost by an American. But it’s quite clear that there is significant job competition between immigrants and less educated American men in occupations such as construction, building cleaning and maintenance, transportation, food service, and others. Agriculture, which many people think of as central to this debate, hardly matters at all since less than 5 percent of illegal immigrants work in that relatively small sector.
Maybe even more important than direct job competition is that fact that the availability of so much immigrant labor reduces the economic, social, and political incentives to examine and address the reasons so many men have dropped out of the job market. Democratic politics will always want to take the path of least resistance, so as long as mass immigration continues, it seems unlikely we’ll undertake the difficult reforms necessary to draw more men back into the world of work.