Uncle Sam's Immigrant Nursing Brigade (reprise)

Foreign-born are the main event of the jobs story, and so is healthcare, but are they the same?

• yes, job growth really is a foreign-born story

• Uncle Sam’s Immigrant Nursing Brigade (if only)

• But, can they do surgery?

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Uncle Sam’s Immigrant Nursing Brigade (reprise)

Employment data is likely to be a bit noisy in the coming weeks, as all the hurricane turmoil works its way through the system.

So, what better time to post some tidbits from the labor market?

Yes, job growth is a foreign-born story

Random Walk generally resists the urge to “dunk on” other scribblers.

The reasons are (a) it’s extremely tempting; (b) it’s not very nice, and (c) it’s not entirely clear that I can’t make the same points without explicit dunking. Perhaps I’ll revisit the “policy,” at some point—it would almost certainly help with engagement, lol—but for now, I’m sticking with it.

In that vein, there are some unnamed scribblers who have tried to falsify the truthful claim that job growth is a “foreign born” story.¹

But they can’t, really, even when they use the word “falsely,” because “foreign born” workers do, in fact, explain most/all of net job growth. And Great Replacement is, in fact, real. Those aren’t necessarily bad things, and that might even be good things, but they are real things.

Indeed, that’s part of what makes immigration such a tricky issue—native born workers are being replaced, but if they weren’t, there’d be little or no job growth at all, because the number of native born workers is rolling over. That’s what happens when people forget to babymake, and the population gets old.

Anyways, the latest iteration of the ‘Great Replacement is real’ comes from the Minneapolis Fed.

These are the estimated contributions to overall employment growth by nativity, broken down by state:

Minneapolis Fed

For all the big states, “foreign-born” drives all or most of the employment gains, such that there are gains.

For example,

• California’s job growth was net-negative (driven by a -2.5% native born contribution), but foreign born employment increased.

• Massachusetts and Ohio were the same deal (albeit less dramatically).

• New Jersey was a job-growth success, driven entirely by a ~7 percentage point increase for foreign born workers, while native born contracted by slightly less than 2%.

• Even places like Texas and Florida, which are big states with sizable increases in native born employment, the foreign born workforce contributed more to the overall growth.

So, yes, job growth is very much a “foreign-born” story.

Uncle Sam’s Immigrant Nursing Brigade (if only)

The other part of the Minni Fed brief that stands out is Uncle Sam’s Immigrant Nursing Brigade.

Unsurprisingly, the distribution of foreign-born workers isn’t random.