9 ms·
‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce
- ptcrash 4y agoNon-paywall link: https://web.archive.org/web/20221215195859/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/12/15/immigration-reform-congress-worker-shortage/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221215195859/https://www.washi...
- MrMan 4y agoHow can we muster the political will to try to get more immigrants to come here? It’s really important
- kelseyfrog 4y agoIt's not our responsibility. Don't worry though, if the people in charge believe an immigration deficit needs to be cured, we'll get our medicine in the form of pro-immigration news and media.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mistrial9 4y agothree decades of declining wages and increasing demands, plus de-facto "illegal" workers in every city in the USA.. perhaps a factor?
- astrange 4y agoUS real median household income is 55% higher in 2019 than 1990. https://twitter.com/MichaelRStrain/status/1603414811471134723 https://twitter.com/MichaelRStrain/status/160341481147113472...
- graevy 4y agoyour source, some guy on twitter from the "american enterprise institute" marketing his book "the american dream is not dead", is cherrypicking from the low to high points of the business cycle: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N from a dataset which actually tracks data outside that range: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-11/58353-HouseholdIncome.pdf https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-11/58353-HouseholdInco... a more robust dataset, which you would get by simply searching "US real median household income" and opening the first result citing census data, indicates that, charitably, real median household income has risen about 25% since 1980: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOeD https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOeD wikipedia's article, which has thoroughly succumbed to link rot, in addition to citing the above data, also provides historical census data neatly summarized on page 5 of this census report pegging an increase at about 15-20% since 1964: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p60-252.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio... this took me 3 minutes
- astrange 4y agoThe difference is mainly that the number I linked is "after taxes and transfers". Also surely 2019 is not the peak of the business cycle? Feb 2020 is. Peak-to-now real income is up for bottom 50% of households since then (https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=income&incomeend=09012022&incomefreq=monthly&incomegroups=Top%2010%25&incomegroups=Middle%2040%25&incomegroups=Bottom%2050%25&incomegroups=Total&incomestart=02012020&incometype=posttax_income&incomeunit=Households&incomey=growth https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=income&incomeend=09012022...) but flat for the rest due to inflation.
- mistrial9 4y ago"Rising wage inequality and slow and uneven hourly wage growth for the vast majority of workers have been defining features of the U.S. labor market for the last four decades, despite steady (if too slow) productivity growth. " --Elise Gould, Senior Economist, The Economic Policy Institute https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/ https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/
- mensetmanusman 4y agoIs it a welcome slowdown to improve worker bargaining power and wages? It is hurting corporate profits though…
- rhaway84773 4y agoIs it though? The evidence suggests (caveat below) that most salary increases have been eaten up in inflation. In the meanwhile businesses are suffering and customers are getting poorer service. Caveat: The actual numbers show that salary increases at the bottom have been slightly higher than inflation. However, food, energy and housing inflation have all been higher than overall inflation, which are items people at the bottom face more. So those who’ve seen their salaries increase the most have also almost certainly seen higher inflation than the headline number. Also, wages were already increasing prior to the pandemic due to several successful efforts to increase minimum wages, etc. So even without the pandemic and the associated immigrant slowdown, there would likely have been some continued wage increases.
- tcbawo 4y agoA lot of people who thought they were above certain kinds of work are finding that they are not. This is creating a lot of socioeconomic tension. On the flip side, it is probably making people better appreciate those willing to do hard, unglamorous jobs.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoOnly superficially does it increase wages. Studies show that immigration counter-intuitively improves the wages of the lower class, mainly through 2 effects: 1. Immigrants spend money. "A rising tide floats all boats". 2. Immigrants take the entry level positions. So in a country without immigrants a high school dropout might become a janitor. But with immigrants the immigrant becomes the janitor and the high school dropout now has differentiable skills -- aka a solid grasp of English. So they get a position as a manager or customer facing position or something. Put a different way, with immigration the wages of janitors goes down, but native born citizens are more likely to have better jobs than janitor.
- mullingitover 4y agoIt's interesting how the roles reversed between the two parties over the decades. Here's a video of George Bush and Ronald Reagan tag-teaming pro-immigration policy speeches[1] that would have them tarred and feathered by the republican party of today. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok
- aperson_hello 4y agoYou're hard pressed to find a democrat who is actually earnestly pushing for immigration reform either. I'd claim the republicans largely swapped and the democrats are only for it just enough to foil the republicans!
- ferrumfist 4y ago> democrats are only for it just enough to foil the republicans Absolutely not. Modern Democrats are neoliberals to the extreme. Neoliberals are very pro-immigration.
- ElevenLathe 4y agoThat's true rhetorically (the favorite specific topic being the "dreamers"), but there is no will to fix the H1B program at all by Democratic leadership. The status quo is great for businesses, a big part of their power base. It's not even bad for support from organized labor (though that matters less and less in real elections as union membership has been in decline for decades), since H1Bs are largely employed in nonunion industries.
- feet 4y agoIt's bigger than that, democrats currently just cry about how bad the Republicans are to get votes and donations then when they're in office they do nothing to fix anything.
- 4y ago
- Gibbon1 4y agoAnother fun bit. In four years we're going to see the impact of the great recession on the workforce entry and housing formation. The birthrate fell during the great recession and then never came back as a result of making rentiers whole on the backs of young families.
- nowandlater 4y agoAlso another factor, once employers start paying a market-clearing wage, then increase their prices, supply will meet demand.
- crmd 4y ago…or not raise prices. I think the root cause of our broken economy is that way too much of gross margin has been flowing to owners/capital instead of workers.
- lamontcg 4y agoThat is because in the short-run everything is sticky so they resist spending more on salaries. So everyone is hiring, but nobody is willing to pay more. If conditions persisted then they'd be forced to start raising wages in order to increase output. Due to the fact that we're also still fairly supply constrained on output they also resist hiring more workers at higher salaries when they're finding it hard to source their inputs (and since everyone is in that same boat, they're not missing out compared to their competitors by not focusing on increasing output). And right now the Fed is also signalling that they're going to crash the economy so it makes absolutely zero sense to start hiring more people at higher wages right before a recession.
- odysseus 4y agoUnpopular opinion, but I'd argue the last ~50 years of legalized abortion, with over 60 million lives lost, also accounts for a large percentage of the missing workforce. (Even more so when you consider the loss of their children and their children's children.) > 18% of the workforce has been wiped out by abortion, and this number will climb to 23% by 2035.^1 > While labor force participation may rise in the short run due to mothers choosing to work instead of taking time off to raise kids, unrestricted abortion is likely to decrease labor supply in the long run. Since the Roe decision in 1973 an estimated 63 million abortions have occurred in the United States. If all of these aborted babies had been otherwise carried to term and survived until today, they would add nearly 20 percent to the current U.S. population, and nearly 45 million would be of working age (18 to 64).^2 (1) https://www.hli.org/resources/abortion-affect-united-states/ https://www.hli.org/resources/abortion-affect-united-states/ (pro-life site warning, but it cites sources including the Census Bureau and Planned Parenthood's own research arm, the Guttmacher Institute) (2) https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/b8807501-210c-4554-9d72-31de4e939578/the-economic-cost-of-abortion.pdf https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/b8807501-210c...
- dradtke 4y agoDeclining birth rates as a whole are to blame for this, not just abortion. Plus, legalized abortion helped reduce crime rates. https://law.stanford.edu/publications/the-impact-of-legalized-abortion-on-crime-over-the-last-two-decades/ https://law.stanford.edu/publications/the-impact-of-legalize...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bojan 4y agoOut of those 45 million, how many of those unwanted kids would end up getting enough education that they can participate in a modern knowledge economy? And how many would end up needing society's support to make ends meet? Restricted abortion leads to the availability of plentiful cheap, low-level labor, but mostly not the sort of labor that the modern economy really needs.
- theknocker 4y ago
- honestduane 4y agoThe sad fact is that we have enough software developers in America to fully meet all of every American companies technical needs; The problem is that these companies don't want to meet the market demands of that labor pool by paying what that market is asking to keep that sustainable, so they want to import people who they can abuse to temporarily lower labor prices for them. And the number of Americans I know who work in tech who are looking for work right now as H1B's post on LinkedIn and publicly make deals to keep Americans out of jobs proves this. Its all being done in public. The thing is, the original H1B ideal is temporary; and so is they cant meet market demands sustainably that way, not if they are growing, and they should be growing or they are dying, and so such companies end up being dependent on offshore imports of H1B people and end up dying when they cant replace them or grow new roles without them, because they started to depend on them and then could not be sustainable outside of that bubble on the real market. The dependency they have is on subsidized cheap labor from other countries that don't asked to be treated like humans, not a lack of skilled tech workers. They have more tech workers than they need, many with more skills and more years of experience at higher end tech roles, many who are looking for work right now in the holidays, and they are just not hiring them because they want to save a few pennies and hire a developer that they have legal ownership of as an indebted visa-slave. And if your hiring software developers, I know many who are looking for work, who are American citizens, who would gladly take the job that an h1b is currently sitting in.
- justanorherhack 4y agoThis is the root issue and it's systemic wage suppression. It's also surreal when entire management structures are h1b1 visa workers and speaks to deeper cultural issues that nobody wants to talk about.
- yunohn 4y ago> speaks to deeper cultural issues that nobody wants to talk about Could you explain further?
- podric 4y agoThe idea that H-1B workers suppress US wages is a harmful myth that gets thrown around HN a lot. The study that supports the claim that the H-1B program suppresses US tech wages is about 20 years old, and no longer reflects the current reality. In fact, a 2017 Glassdoor study found that the wages of H-1B workers were 2.8% higher than their American counterparts: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/h1b-workers/ https://www.glassdoor.com/research/h1b-workers/ The US creates several million new jobs each year on average, and the H-1B cap is 85K, which is an order of magnitude less than the number of jobs created per year. In order for the H-1B program to meaningfully impact the US labor market, the H-1B cap needs to be increased significantly.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoAnother "shortage of workers" article aimed at the plutocracy that should be retitled "shortage of pay" to attract them. "We've tried everything, including raising pay $3 an hour!" => after a wave of significant inflation. Really? I understand many service workers are undocumented, but where are the I-9 forms going? Every job I've had made me fill one out, by law. Here we have a number of organizations outing themselves in print (in the capital no less) as not complying. Well the article implies that anyway. Are they paying taxes on these workers? How does this actually work?
- Blackthorn 4y ago> I understand many service workers are undocumented, but where are the I-9 forms going? Every job I've had made me fill one out, by law. You can just be dishonest on an I9 form. It's a piece of paper, not a mindreading lie detector.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoYes you can lie on any form. Eventually it catches up with you, especially when your organization is featured in the newspaper. The article doesn’t expand just takes widespread fraud as a fact of life.
- cat_plus_plus 4y agoNo it's not. Immigrants tend to adopt to native sub-replacement birth rate and bring their elderly parents to live in US and often make use of social security. Even to the degree that they have children, children take two decades to enter the workforce. Bottom line, it's impossible to solve US labor shortage with any reasonable immigration levels under current policies. Unless you want a Dubai style system where only active workers are welcome and those don't get benefits of the citizens.
- cersei 4y agoI don't think people want to come into the US anymore. The country has been in a serious decline since Bush Jr, and it's not going to be changed by a one or two terms of a democratic presidency. Even developing countries don't have the same issues with abortion rights, etc...
- Ekaros 4y agoI don't think abortion rights are a big problem. But health-care, education both primary and later. Raising costs of living and housing. It is not exactly pretty picture from outside.
- akomtu 4y agoAbortion? I bet most of the immigrants watch the old american movies and imagine how they live in their own house with a green lawn. They chase the american dream.