Birth Rate and Labor
Its Saturday and I am on the run. So, I am being brief. Another Dean Baker piece. This time on Immigrants. The one thing I keep saying over and over again is about our replacement rate. This is not like after WWII when men came home from WWII. got married, and population increased dramatically. The Macrotrends Chart shows such:
I tend to look at this chart and say; Wow, it appears that we may be needing Labor as the US has a low reproduction rate from 1970 onward. The 2025 rate (chart is 1.75. Other sources say less. The country is big and we could take in more people. There is a potential issue on the horizon as the rest of the baby boomers and the next generation age out. Also immigrant labor has to start somewhere. Whether it be on a farm of mixing cement and carrying the 5-gallon buckets to the cement workers like I did. We do need lower cost labor whether Trunmp likes them or not. His efforts are not matching up properly nd we will have issues in the future.
“Trump Mistake #27,462: Chasing Away Immigrants Doesn’t Help Native Born Workers'” Patreon, Dean Baker
I just have a quick note today.
It probably is not a surprise to most people outside the Trump administration, but it looks like their mass deportation has not done much to help the native-born workforce. The unemployment rate for native-born workers in May was 4.2%. That’s up from 4.1% last May, and 3.8% in May of 2024, when Joe Biden was in the White House, and immigrants were taking all the jobs.
This outcome shouldn’t be a big surprise to people who have given the issue much thought. Most of the jobs that immigrants do are not ones that native-born workers are lining up for. Few people born in this country want to work on farms picking lettuce or tomatoes or in meat-processing plants. It’s the same story with low-paying jobs such as home health care aides or custodians.
It was Trumpian silly to think that mass deportation of immigrants was going to lead to a huge wave of jobs for native born workers. In fact, as much research has shown, immigrant workers tend to act as complements to native-born workers, not substitutes.
This is perhaps most clearly seen in the construction industry, where close to 30% of the workforce are immigrants. The availability of lower-cost immigrant labor allows many projects to go forward that would not otherwise. In this way, it is a net job gainer for native-born workers. This is likely true in many other areas as well.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that immigrants never lower the wages of native-born workers. There are likely cases where workers on H1-B visas have reduced the wages of workers in some occupations, even if the effect of the program in general may still be positive. I am also confident that if we eased the immigration barriers to foreign-trained doctors, the pay of our doctors would not still be twice as high as in other wealthy countries, thereby lowering healthcare costs.
Also, negative impacts may not be reversible. There is now solid evidence that opening trade to China cost the U.S. millions of manufacturing jobs. That doesn’t mean that putting up tariffs will bring the jobs back. Half a century ago, the meat-packing industry had many good-paying union jobs that were later taken by low-paid immigrants. Chasing away immigrants now will not bring those good-paying jobs back.
Anyhow, the results to date are clear. Trump’s mass deportation has not led to any sort of windfall for native-born workers. As the Trumpers say, “Trump was wrong about everything.”
Again, this assessment of what makes sense today feels in conflict with what will make sense in the pretty-near future if it develops along Reich’s vision of trying to “co-exist” with AI net devouring paid human occupations via much earlier retirement plus UBI. No point in dancing around what Reich is telling us to prepare for: very high unemployment, to be handled by absurdly limiting human careers and renaming unemployment insurance as UBI, but not giving it a limited term. Reich could be wrong, but let’s prepare as if he isn’t because there is a pretty good chance if in 15 years most Americans have fulfilling careers and we still can’t find enough folks to cut new pin positions at all the golf clubs, we can have a program for that. If Reich is right, what will we see in 5 years? Millions of immigrants – many still pretty young – whose access to American labor markets depends on undercutting labor law and standards much worse than we see today. Yes, it will depend on unscrupulous employers, but they don’t ever seem to be in short supply. Not saying Baker is totally wrong, but policy needs to address the future more than the idea that for a few years maybe roofing jobs will slip 8 months.