Speaking of prescriptions in his Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley has a prescription for addressing the need of American businesses for workers:
If President Biden and the Democrats who control Congress want to do something constructive about the labor shortage and its impact on inflation, they might turn their attention to our broken immigration system. Unauthorized immigration takes up most of the oxygen in this debate, but our system for admitting legal foreign workers is also in need of repair. A recent labor-market analysis by Goldman Sachs details the extent to which lower levels of legal immigration in recent years—stemming both from Covid and from the Trump administration’s more restrictive policies prior to the pandemic—have reduced the number of available workers.
“From 2010 to 2018, foreign-born workers accounted for nearly 60% of the growth in the U.S. labor force, but growth in the foreign-born population slowed to around 100k/yr between 2019 and 2021, leaving the U.S. population around 2 million smaller than it otherwise would have been, and the labor force around 1.6 million smaller,†the report finds.
Let’s just consider that last number (2 million).
According to that graph more than 3 million prospective workers are just on the sidelines. Where are they? According to this they aren’t in school. The fulltime enrollment in institutions of higher education has actually decreased by a third of a million so that’s no explanation.
In addition I think this is an instance of the “lump of labor” fallacy. I’ll get to that in my next post.
One last point. As of this writing we have the highest proportion of immigrant population in the last century—more than 1/7th of the population. IMO our society has a carrying capacity for immigrants and we reached it some time ago. Consequently, if you plan to import a workforce, you’ve got to start excluding some people from the country. I’m extremely skeptical that the migrants who are crossing our southern border every day are the workforce that we need or that Mr. Riley has in mind.
Almost every graph of this nature that one sees has the same distinct feature: whatever is being measured has not returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Two important examples:
1) Biden talks about all the jobs he has created. But as of last month total employment had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. He is citing snap back; he has created nothing.
2) Apologists for Biden’s energy issues like to say that we are drilling and refining more oil and gas than during Trump’s Admin. But its a dishonest statistical sleight of hand. The fact of the matter is that we are still below pre-pandemic levels. They get their claim from averaging Trumps administration, pulling down the average due to 2020. Biden’s policies have been restrictive.
WRT importing a workforce, we need to stop paying people not to work. Let some sort of equilibrium form first. On the bright side, at least we are no longer terrorizing people with covid fear. Its actually quite prevalent right now. But since Biden was going to wipe covid out (snicker) there is very little public discourse.
The gap between that pre-pandemic number and the present one represents 3 million people.
Another way to estimate the gap:
https://www.bls.gov/emp/graphics/total-employment.htm
I wonder just what the effect of skills mismatch is on employment. I was concerned that as my daughter left her teaching career she might have some difficulty going back into the business world. It took her all of 3 weeks to find an attractive position. To your immigration point – US business needs well educated and trainable people. Low skilled US or immigrant workers are needed, but not the prime directive. And businesses are adjusting.
Even better is FRED’s graph:
which shows a longer elapsed period. Total employed today are fewer than were employed in March 2020.
Note the estimate in the BLS chart—it’s basically flat.
FRED gives you the raw numbers. 2/2020 about 152,500,00. May 2022 about 151,680,000. In the 16 months since 1/2021 we have added about 8 million jobs in 16 months.
Steve
Dave – yes. Biden’s claims are air.
steve – WTFU. Look at the graph for gods sake. An economy always rebounds, with employment increasing. Its rebound, not new job creation. Joltin’ Joe has done nothing. And he’s still in deficit. He is Zip. Zero.
Why do you think only you and a couple dozen other people think he’s doing great? Are you that blindly partisan. Perhaps a cultist?