Immigration And Inflation Crushing American Workers

The Biden Rush continues—apprehensions at the Southwest border, a proxy for total crossings, tower above anything seen in recent history. This is particularly ominous because immigrant displacement of American workers, which will ultimately be impacted by this influx, also continues at historic highs....

Apprehensions ticked up again up the Southwest border in February and were unprecedented in recent history...

Disquieting features of last month’s influx: a sharp increase in single adult Mexicans and in the number of minor children traveling without parents...

The economy added back the most jobs since July 2021 last month, as an already tight labor market gobbled up 678,000 additional workers...

Despite 1.092 million immigrants reported as unemployed in February, the foreign-born working-age population expanded by more than 1 million, year-over-year, for the sixth straight month... So the immigrant workforce population grew by 1.345 million in February 2022 compared to February 2021...

Our analysis shows that 17.929% of jobs were held by immigrants in February....

Each 1% rise in immigrant employment share represents a transfer of about 1.5 million jobs from native-born Americans to immigrants [presumably both legal and illegal]....

Worse, year-over-year CPI inflation in February came in at 7.9% This is beginning to get serious even by the standards of the 1960s-1980s Great Inflation....

The big picture: The U.S. economy still has roughly 2 million fewer jobs than before the mass layoffs that began two years ago this month. And immigrants, legal and illegal, seem likely to edge out Americans in the recovery—and to beat down the wages of those Americans who succeed in getting jobs.