U.S. President Joe Biden is slated to significantly enhance the number of immigrant workers in the U.S, adding approximately half a million individuals to occupy positions in the American job market, even as a substantial segment of the American populace remains unemployed.
Goldman Sachs analysts predict that Biden’s expansion of the lawful immigration protocol — a system that annually grants over a million foreign individuals green cards, besides another million obtaining temporary work permits — is set to introduce roughly 500,000 international workers into the labor force by the middle of the upcoming June.
According to the experts, the current administration is steadily infusing the employment sector each month with a considerable count of foreign employees who are eligible to be engaged by employers, potentially at lesser remunerations and diminished benefits.
They state, “…the ascent in the immigrant labor force has experienced a monthly escalation ranging from 50k to 160k this year, propelled by a skyrocketing participation rate of the foreign-born workforce.”
This continual increment of overseas workers in the labor pool, highlighted recently by Federal Reserve Chairperson Jerome Powell, is serving to recalibrate the job market dynamics, subtly shifting the advantage from employees to employers, and in the process, restraining wage inflation.
Powell remarked, “This adjustment has moderated wage strains. We are observing a gentle deceleration in the growth rate of wages, as indicated by various metrics.”
This forecast emerges amidst revelations by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) that as of April, an excess of 44 million U.S-born citizens are excluded from the labor market, a figure which does not encompass the multitude documented in the regular unemployment statistics.
There has been a noticeable dip in the labor participation rate of native-born Americans over the last twenty years, a trend which contrasts starkly with the rise in the immigrant labor force.
For instance, between 1960 and 2023, there has been a nearly 14 million increase in the number of U.S-born males aged 16 to 64 years who are not part of the labor market. Simultaneously, the foreign-born labor segment within the same age bracket surged by about 13.7 million.
This pattern is glaringly evident among the working class and the lower-middle strata of the nation.
As noted by CIS analysts Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler, “… the proportion of American-born males aged 20 to 64 lacking a bachelor’s degree who are not active in the workforce has deteriorated significantly since 1960, marking a substantial decrease in April of the current year.”
Conversely, immigrant males in the 20 to 64 age group without a bachelor’s degree experienced a dip in their labor force engagement since 2006, albeit their participation rate remains noticeably higher than their U.S-born counterparts belonging to the working class.
In a recent survey conducted in April, it was found that 85.8 percent of these foreign-born males were actively employed, which is almost 10 percent higher than the employment rate among native-born American males from the working class.
