Employment growth is a foreign-born story (reprise)

We discovered an extra 2M workers

• employment growth is an even foreign-born-ier story than before

• love it or hate it, it’s (still) not immigration-as-usual. it’s uncharted territory.

• growth like we’ve never seen (because we have no alternative)

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Employment growth is a foreign-born story (reprise)

(Mostly) unnoticed in last week’s jobs report was a substantial increase in the estimated size of the labor force.¹

We gained ~2.1M workers, the overwhelming majority of them (~2M) gainfully employed.

BLS

The effect of “updated population controls” (i.e. census population data) added to levels, but barely dented ratios.

So. It turns out we have 2M more workers than we thought (the fuzziness of the estimate, notwithstanding). That’s good news.

How did we gain workers? Well, migration of course.

Whether you love open borders are hate them, everyone now seems to agree that job growth has been a foreign-born story.

Immigrants were also a key driver of job growth in 2024, Friday’s report showed. The number of employed foreign-born workers grew by 1.9 million in the year through January, compared to a gain of 766,000 for the native-born population. . . .

Immigrants — legal and undocumented — currently account for one in five US workers, a record in data going back nearly two decades. The BLS consider those born outside of the US to parents who aren’t citizens as foreign-born, regardless of immigration status.

Immigrants have been a key driver of job growth in the aftermath of the pandemic, helping offset a sluggish recovery in native-born participation. More than 5 million foreign workers joined the labor force in the past five years, with most of that growth coming in 2022 and 2023 as a result of both an unprecedented number of southern border crossings and the government working through years of visa backlogs.

Bloomberg

~70% of the added workers in 2024 were foreign-born.

Since 2020, the breakdown is even more stark:

CIS

~88% of the employment growth since 2020 is attributable to foreign-born workers.

So yes, job growth (or recovery) is mostly a foreign-born story. There’s no real debating it, at this point.

Not immigration-as-usual (reprise)

And no, for the umpteenth time, this is not “immigration as usual.” That doesn’t make it bad or good, but it surely is different.