Many in the media have called for increased immigration because the number of new arrivals fell during Covid. So, it’s argued, immigrant workers are “missing,” creating a labor “shortage.” Commerce secretary Gina Raimondo just this week told Axios that, “We’re down a million immigrants a year. That’s a workforce that we need.”
Uh, no. Any analysis showing that immigration is lower than before Covid is out of date. As my colleagues Steven Camarota and Karen Ziegler show in their new report, the latest data show that the number of immigrant workers is now well above pre-pandemic levels — 27.7 million in November 2019 compared to 29.6 million last month.
Further confirmation that immigration has dramatically rebounded comes from a new estimates out this week from the Census Bureau. The Bureau, which tends to underestimate immigration, reports that net international migration (the difference between the number of immigrants and native-born people coming and going) between mid 2021 and mid 2022 was up 67 percent over the prior year. The monthly data since then shows continued dramatic growth:
If workers are “missing” it’s because of the decades-long decline in the labor-force-participation rate — the share of working-age Americans who are either working or actively looking for work. (Nicholas Eberstadt raised the alarm about this in his book Men Without Work.) The decline is particularly bad among men without a bachelor’s degree. For example, 83 percent of U.S.-born, non-college men 18 to 64 were in the labor force in 2000. Today, it’s down to 75 percent. They don’t show up as unemployed because they have not looked for a job in the prior four weeks. If the labor-force-participation rate of working-age U.S.-born men and women returned just to what it was in was in 2000, it would add more than 6 million workers.
Some may respond, “If Americans won’t work, let’s bring in immigrants who will.” But consider the implications of this argument. It’s well established that the decline in labor-force participation is associated with a host of undesirable outcomes: substance abuse, welfare dependency, poor mental health, crime, lack of family formation, and early death. The fiscal costs associated with all these problems are paid for by taxpayers. Furthermore, the social disorder that plagues communities where many men do not work isn’t confined to those areas. To be sure, a significant share of the millions of the less-educated Americans who have dropped out of the labor force have made poor choices in life. But they are our fellow Americans, and we have a greater responsibility for them than for prospective immigrants overseas who want to come here.
Drawing able-bodied men back into the job market won’t be easy. But we either figure out how to reform the welfare and disability systems, address the opioid and mental-health crises, improve job training, apprenticeships, and prisoner re-entry, and re-emphasize the value of work — or we import more immigrants and then come up with various band-aids to cover up the social pathologies associated with low labor force participation.
Reductions in immigration would not only allow wages to rise for the less-educated, making work more attractive, but maybe more important is the reality that importing so many immigrants allows us to ignore our own workforce problem. What incentive is there to take the difficult social, political, and economic steps necessary to address our “men without work” problem if we continue to import millions of immigrant workers?