The sad truth behind job growth in the American economy

According to Axios, a left-leaning publication, the only thing keeping the American economy afloat is the blessed presence of foreign-born workers…because those lazy Americans just won’t work. However, according to a study by Zero Hedge, Americans are losing their jobs like crazy, and only foreign-born workers are getting those jobs. Who to believe? Who to believe?

First, Axios:

Immigrants are joining the U.S. workforce at much higher levels than normal.

• They’re likely to account for roughly half a million new jobs over the next three quarters, per a new report from Goldman Sachs.

Why it matters: As the U.S. continues to struggle with a historically-tight labor market, immigrants are coming to the rescue of desperate employers — while also creating new jobs themselves.

By the numbers: Between the pre-pandemic month of January 2020 and July 2023, the immigrant labor force grew by 9.5%. That compares to a tiny 1.5% growth rate among the native-born.

Axios points to three factors behind the data: First, huge numbers of legal immigrants are getting visas. As I see it, that means the Biden administration is flooding the American economy with foreign-born workers.

Image: Short order cooks (edited). YouTube screen grab.

Second, foreign-born workers are, in fact, working, with their participation rate at 67% compared to actual Americans, who are at 62.2%. Third, baby boomers are retiring, and younger people are more likely to be foreign-born.

As Axios proudly states of immigrants, “We get the job done.”

The Zero Hedge article is behind a paywall, but Gateway Pundit summarizes the top line: It wasn’t just that American-born workers were lying around on couches smoking pot and playing video games, although, sadly, I’m sure that a lot were. It’s also that 1.2 million of them lost their jobs. Of those 1.2 million lost jobs, foreign workers replaced 771,000 of them.

Was it a direct one-to-one replacement? I don’t know. But it appears that 1.2 million Americans wanted to work, but their employers didn’t want them. Instead, a great many employers preferred 771,000 foreign-born workers.

Those statistics also probably tell only the tale of legal foreign-born workers. They don’t talk about the low-level workers (gardeners, janitors, etc.), who are often paid under the table, whether legal or not. I suspect that a lot of those jobs are now in the hands of non-natives, too.

As I alluded to above, there’s also a problem with young American workers. Many are not interested, with TikTok awash in videos of young Americans complaining about the intolerable burden of having to hold a job. These same young people are also graduates of high schools that focused hard on DEI and gender identity but forgot to teach them basic reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. Many foreign-born workers still believe in the male-female binary and can do addition and subtraction. They may even feel that you can get through the day without lighting up a joint.

We are in a terrible mess. Our education system de-educates young people, leaving them unfit for work. Our social policies have led to negative population growth among native-born Americans. And the current administration is desperate to replace American workers with people who will be grateful to the political party that let them in and who invariably come from nations with governments that are some variation of leftist, so they’re receptive to the leftist way of doing things.