A February 13th report by Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler details how President Joe Biden’s “Job Growth” is being made up by illegal labor and not by Americans. With companies being incentivized to hire these illegals and pay them less than American citizens, for many, it’s a no-brainer.
“Comparing the fourth quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2023 shows 2.7 million more people working in the United States — 2.9 million more immigrants (legal and illegal) and 183,000 fewer U.S.-born Americans. Since the depths of the Covid Recession in 2020 employment has increased for both groups. But the number of U.S.-born workers has not made it back to the 2019 pre-Covid level. Equally important, the share of working-age, U.S.-born men without a bachelor’s not in the labor force deteriorated in the decades prior to 2019, and the rate in the fourth quarter of 2023 was lower still.”
Camarota and Ziegler based their findings on “analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies is based on the Current Population Survey (CPS), collected by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We focus on the peak years of prior economic expansions (2000, 2006, and 2019) as well as 2023 because it is the most recent quarterly data available.”
While the data does not conclusively say employers are choosing to hire illegals over native Americans, the signs all make it a very simple line to connect. With many Americans retiring during and following COVID, we didn’t have the glut of Americans ready to fill those spots either. The result became outsourcing work and hiring illegals.
This isn’t “growth.” This is backfilling a massive hole with artificial filler.
