One lead story in the Wall Street Journal today, How Immigration Remade the U.S. Labor Force, tries to get its arms around the immigrant impact on the US economy using data. On the one hand, the Journal gets points for trying to mine a wide range of sources, such as immigrant court records, a KFF Health News/Los Angeles Times survey to CBO data to Census Bureau surveys.
On the other (and this admittedly reflects the propensities of these sources, to go into drunk under the streetlight mode with the information they gathered) is that these compilations are inherently questionable given how large the population of illegal immigrants is relative to the total, and how most of them understandably are trying to stay under the radar. Even with less than ideal information, the story early on flags why there is a controversy: the inflows have risen considerably under Biden:
Since the start of 2021, net immigration to the U.S. has totaled roughly 9.3 million people, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office.
That’s more than three times the net number of people that entered the country over the previous four years
This chart gives a sense of the nature of the problem:
To clarify the categories, from the interactive chart:
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Lawful permanent residents generally refer to green-card holders. Net inflows of this group have been relatively steady from year to year.
The nonimmigrant group includes temporary workers, student visitors and officials of foreign governments. Negative net immigration in a group means it got smaller from the year before, the result of things like people leaving the U.S. and changes in status.
The biggest net increase has been in the other foreign nationals category, which includes people who entered the U.S. undetected, as well as those who were paroled into the country and are awaiting proceedings in immigration court.
Before we go any further, yours truly is very leery of the pretend precision in this article. Conservatives are not crazy when they contend that the number of undocumented immigrants could well be higher than the estimates. I regard it as a chart crime to include such squishy figures from that taken from populations where the officials have much more solid counts. There’s no way (and no attempt) in any of the many charts and tables to indicate that the illegal immigrant data has vastly higher error bands than that from the other groups.
For instance, in the early 2000s, a unit of American Express asked me to identify long-term trends that they should keep in mind or use in marketing strategies. Obviously there are tons of firms and mavens who pretend to do that for a living. They were asking me to dig through a huge raft of this crystal-balling and pick out forecasts that seemed sound.
One of three I identified was demographic change. This study came right after the 2000 Census results were released. Demographers were shocked at the magnitude of the population increase. They had expected the US to follow other advanced economies who were having declining birth rates and show only a modest increase. The much-greater-than-anticipated rise was due primarily to the heretofore unrecognized magnitude of illegal immigration, and secondarily not allowing enough for the increase in the Hispanic population, which had higher birth rates.
The fact that so many experts had been blindsided by this change told me how bad the information capture had been, and how intrinsically difficult it would be to do much better. Even though there are no doubt concerted efforts to come up with better estimates, they are always going to be very squishy.
Mind you, many of the findings seem intuitively correct. However, when I was at McKinsey, once in great while, the studies would attempt to give theorizing more solidity by representing it as a graphic. I would beef that the charts should be labeled, “McKinsey intuition”.
Again, these tables have some underpinning but should have stronger caveats. So I would treat them as probably directionally correct but would be leery of quoting figures. The magnitude of the undocumented migrant segment is so large and so difficult to dimension with great confidence that it makes it hard to generalize to the entire immigrant population. That problem is worse if the critics are correct and the illegal immigrant numbers are much larger than shown in the estimates here.
Some examples below, based on Census Bureau monthly household surveys. The Journal acknowledges the probable incompleteness:
The number of post-2020 immigrants who participate in the monthly Census survey is small and demographers believe unauthorized immigrants are less likely to respond when the government calls to ask questions.
But looking at the people who do respond to the monthly Census allows some inferences about their characteristics.
Small samples also reduce reliability. Nevertheless:
As the article explains:
Recent migrants are younger and more likely to be of working age than U.S.-born Americans. Of foreigners who arrived since 2020, 78% are between the ages of 16 and 64, compared with 60% of those born in the U.S., according to the monthly census data.
That helps explain why they are also more likely to be in the labor force. Of recent immigrants age 16 or older, 68%—the participation rate—are either working or looking for a job, compared with 62% for U.S.-born Americans. In raw numbers, that likely amounts to more than five million people, equal to roughly 3% of the labor force.
The article also shows how different data sources, using different sampling methods, come to different conclusions:
The 12 largest source countries for newcomers assigned immigration-court hearings since late 2020 are in Latin America or the Caribbean, the TRAC data show, led by Venezuela at 14%, Mexico at 13% and Honduras at 8.5%.
Monthly census data paint a slightly different picture, suggesting that Mexico is the most-common country of origin, followed by Venezuela and India.
Admittedly, the comments on this story present sample bias of their own. But it was instructive to see some arguing against illegal immigration in order to support US wages and thus provide for stronger social programs:
Claude King
Misleading article again from WSJ, illegal immigration hurts the low income groups and degrades the quality of workers available.
Legal immigration is what we need, along with an energy policy that supports on-shoring production.
Our government has favored the Globalists profits over what’s good for the country.
Hiding behind cheaper prices and low quality instead good jobs and reduction of entitlements which are used to buy votes.
Some objected to not including other information sources (note I have not verified that the claim below is accurate but it didn’t elicit pushback in a pretty feisty se of comments:
Micky Murray
The article is incorrect because they list total immigration in 2024 at less than 4 million. The correct YTD number is over 8 million according to the department of homeland security. and the real number is even higher when you include the known and unknown gotaways. So it is easily over 10:million.
The article depicted the immigrants on average having higher levels that natives of those lacking a high school degree, but also doing a smidge better on the proportion with a college eduction. A comment on skill levels:
JoNg TiffMia
I’ve hired many of the illegal immigrants that have moved into my area. Many are hard working but unskilled to a level that is unbelievable. They have no idea how to paint a house or dig a hole, much less a trade that requires some level of skill and training. If there are millions of new workers with limited English and very low skill, who is going to pay for the training and upskilling of these people? On top of this, the undocumented nature of these folks means they have endless problems navigating life in the USA. One example, a Honduran worker I hired needed some medicine for his diabetes. He thought it was a prescription that he couldn’t get in the US so he had his daughter ship it from Honduras, only to have UPS hold the package because they couldn’t verify who the recipient was. He couldn’t navigate the UPS customs process so I helped him do it, only to find out that they were paying hundreds of dollars to ship an herbal creme that was available over the counter on Amazon for $25 and could be shipped to me by tomorrow. Just that small experience made me realize having a life as an undocumented worker is completely untenable to have millions of people under this status, permanently. Therefore, I conclude that Americans will be forced to realize this is reality at some point and we will have to accept that ALL of these people will eventually become documented Americans at some point. It’ll just take until the next Dem president, house and senate. That’s the reality.
I have to differ with the claim that illegal immigrants will be regularized at some point. I had a friend back in the day who had gotten partway through the legal immigration process and then stalled out due when his US wife stopped cooperating. Obama had developed an amnesty program, and he joked that he would be the only person to qualify, since it required paying all taxes due. He’d gotten as far as getting a SSN and so was compliant. I suspect the tax demand will remain a sticking point.
And a reader pushed back, objecting to likely labor exploitation:
Marc Jones
Take a look at Europe. It is tearing itself apart as it tries to do what you wish.
Look in the mirror. Is this about you being magnanimous or just being greedy? Those illegals you hire, do you pay them enough such that they can live without housing and food subsidies? Do you have them all enrolled in a healthcare program, so they can pay for what is necessary when they and their families are sick or injured. Are you making donations to your local school district so the extra educational services their children require are not dropped on the backs of taxpaying citizens?
I have been listening to this rap my whole life. It always sounds great. But when I turn it over and look closely, the picture changes.
These comments do not quite amount to a sea change, but they do seem to represent a much lower level of defense of migration as a presumed good thing than I recall seeing in the Journal in the past. The comments included observations that were shades of Brexit, on how high and low wage immigrants both were contributing to high housing prices. So if nothing else, the level of cheap sloganeering to at least somewhat reasoned arguments was an improvement from what I’ve often seen at the Journal before. One can take that as progress of sorts.
