The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“There might as well be a giant “Help Wanted” sigh over the United States. The economy has bounced back swiftly from the pandemic lows—aided by more than $5 trillion in government aid—and companies are frantically trying to hire enough workers to keep up with the surge in demand for everything from waffle irons to cars. The nation has more than 11 million job openings and 6 million unemployed.
“This imbalance is giving workers and job seekers tremendous power. Pay is rising at its fasters pace in recent years, workers are quitting jobs and finding new ones at record levels, hourly employees at companies such as Starbucks and Amazon are starting unions, and companies are offering flexibility and benefits that would have been almost unthinkable pre-pandemic. These are welcome trends.
“But it is also the case that the U.S. is still operating with significantly fewer workers than before the pandemic. The labor participation rate, the measure of how many civilians 16 or older are working or looking for work, is at 62.4 percent—down a full percentage point from before the pandemic. Much of the decline can be explained by two factors: a surge in Americans retiring and a massive drop in legal immigration under President Trump. . .
“There are 9.5 million people waiting for their legal immigration paperwork to be processed by the U.S. government. . . . They are ready and able to work, yet government bureaucracy is in the way. This is a major loss for the U.S. economy. . . . Companies are desperate for workers. Millions of legal immigrants want to work in the United States. This shouldn’t be hard to fix.” – The U.S. Needs More workers. Too bad Our Legal Immigration Is a Mess, Editorial Board, The Washington Post, 4/5/22. [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: Mass immigration advocates in the media and elsewhere endlessly repeat this talking point: we’ve run out of Americans to do jobs, so we must import foreign workers. This message, in all its variations, misleads in many ways. One example is ignoring how automation will fill jobs. Another illustration is the statement in this article about eleven million job openings and only six million jobless Americans. Surely this is proof that we have a labor shortage, right? Not so fast.
The figure of six million is what economists call the “U-3” number, and it is usually the one the media cite when reporting unemployment. But many experts in the field say that it is inaccurate because it doesn’t count people who should be counted as unemployed. These include job seekers who have not recently applied for work and people who can’t find full-time employment and have to settle for part-time work. Adding them to the C-3 number make what economists call the U-6 figure. The current U-6 total is now around 11 million, about the number as job openings.
But even more American workers are potentially available. Tens of millions of Americans of working age are totally out of the workforce. Many are people such as homemakers and students who have made an understandable decision not to work. But millions of others might be led back into the workforce if conditions were right. Interestingly, this article mentions the solution in passing, evidently without recognizing what it is admitting. Essentially the remedy is a tight labor market i.e., one with a high demand for workers that gives “workers and job seekers tremendous power.” Of course, the article doesn’t mention it, but this tight market was happening under President Trump. Now the market is loose and getting looser thanks to the Biden Administration’s commitment to mass immigration.
Flooding our labor market with foreigners workers helps vested economic interest by keeping wages low and preventing improvement of working conditions. This is the situation that discourages many Americans from actively seeking employment. Now we most definitely need a tighter labor market to help them. Many American workers are suffering. Meanwhile the rich get richer from the cheap immigrant labor they enjoy. One reason they can get away with paying immigrants little because immigrant households receive welfare at a higher rate than natives. This welfare is a taxpaid subsidy for profits derived from cheap labor.
The article says that companies are “desperate” for workers. Be that as it may, it is long past time to consider that a great many American workers have a desperate need for decent jobs.