Men Without Work: The Immigration Angle

Brent Orrell and Keith Humphreys published a thoughtful piece in The Atlantic last week on the issue of men dropping out of the labor force. Although the authors seem open to several possible remedies, they underplay the role of immigration — as one of the causes of the labor force dropout and, more important, as a disincentive to pursuing a full set of solutions.

To quickly recap the problem: The share of working-age U.S.-born men who are “out of the labor force,” meaning neither working nor looking for work, has been gradually rising for decades. It was 11 percent in 1960, 15 percent in 1970, 17 percent in 2000, and 22 percent this April. We know from the American Time Use Survey that these men have not abandoned work because they are doing something else productive, such as taking care of a loved one or volunteering in the community. Instead, they are using their free time mainly to sleep, watch television, and play video games.

The sources of this problem are surely varied, as Orrell and Humphreys emphasize, but the authors dismiss immigration as one causal factor without any analysis. In reality, economic research has repeatedly found that immigration reduces the wages of existing workers with whom the immigrants most directly compete. Furthermore, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cases show a clear pattern in which employers of low-skill labor favor immigrants over natives. I don’t mean “favor” as in they show some kind of subtle statistical preference. I mean they allegedly announce things like “All you Americans are fired” to large groups of workers.

Of course, part of the reason for that discrimination may be the other factors that Orrell and Humphreys mention. Too many native-born men have criminal backgrounds or suffer from welfare dependency, drug abuse, and a basic inability to avoid the distractions of modern technology. In that context, it’s more understandable that employers prefer immigrants for certain manual labor jobs.

But the authors miss a critical point: Immigration allows us to ignore these problems. As long as the inflow of foreign workers is sufficient to keep businesses operating, the political pressure to take on the problems of the native underclass will remain weak. This indirect impact of immigration on the labor-force dropout problem remains true even if one chooses to ignore the direct impact immigration may have on wages and employment.

Imagine if the foreign labor spigot were turned off. Employers, politicians, and even the general public would then have a strong economic interest in recruiting native-born men back into the labor force to keep key sectors of the economy operating at full capacity. Politically difficult reforms, such as cutting back on welfare programs or reversing our society’s growing tolerance for gambling and drugs, might no longer be so difficult.

Automation would likely be part of employers’ response, but so too would outreach to disaffected workers. We need not look far for examples. “The tightest labor market in more than half a century is finally lifting the wages of the least-skilled workers on the bottom rung of the labor force, bucking years of stagnation,” reported Eduardo Porter in the New York Times during the first Trump administration. “Big companies such as Walmart and Koch Industries . . . are turning to an underutilized source of labor: inmates and the formerly incarcerated,” added Heather Long in the Washington Post.

The availability of low-skill immigration short-circuits that natural market process. It allows employers to skip outreach to marginalized Americans, politicians to duck hard policy choices, and ordinary Americans to keep the problems of the underclass out of mind. By contrast, a policy of lower immigration would increase the incentive to pursue the full set of solutions that Orrell and Humphreys identify.