Here is Catherine Rampell at The Washington Post:
As I’ve noted before, immigrants are driving the U.S. economic boom. That is: The United States has escaped recession, hiring growth has exceeded expectation, and inflation has cooled faster than predicted — all largely because immigration has boosted the size of the U.S. labor force. Don’t just take my word for it; ask the Federal Reserve chair or Wall Street economists.
After a stretch of depressed immigration levels — primarily driven by Donald Trump’s hobbling of the legal immigration system — the number of immigrants coming here began to rebound mid-2021. Immigrants are more likely to be working-age than native-born Americans, so their arrivals helped solve a number of problems facing the U.S. economy.
For instance, some of our pandemic-related supply-chain woes were related to worker shortages in critical fields such as construction and food processing. An influx of new workers helped fill those vacancies and unsnarl stuck supply chains. In other cases, immigrants have been willing to take jobs that native-born Americans are unwilling to do, such as the backbreaking work of harvesting potatoes, building homes and caring for the elderly. They’re also filling high-tech positions that Americans cannot do because there are insufficient numbers of us with the necessary skills. And they are creating entirely new job opportunities by launching new businesses — something immigrants do at much higher rates than the native-born.
And then there are the jobs we native-born Americans might theoretically be willing and able to fill, but there simply aren’t enough of us around to fill them. The arithmetic is clear: Boomers are retiring and U.S. birthrates have plummeted. Absent immigration, the U.S. working-age population would be either flat or soon shrinking.
As a result, all of the new job growth since the pandemic, on net, has been due to foreign-born workers. That is, if you stripped away immigrants, there would be no more people employed today than was the case before covid.
Read the rest here.