While American-born citizens fail to join the workforce in adequate numbers, President Joe Biden has filled their positions with millions of migrants. The entire situation was created by bad incentives.
On Tuesday, the Center for Immigration Studies published a study revealing a startling fact: migrants (both legal and illegal) are replacing American-born citizens in the labor force. Labor force participation in the United States went back up to 77% in 2023, which was about the same percentage that participation was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
It may appear contradictory at first to say migrants are flooding into the workplace, and yet the labor force participation is relatively the same. This discrepancy is resolved when seeing who is participating now as compared to before. The study also shows that 183,000 fewer American-born citizens were in the labor force by 2023. However, 2.9 million more migrants have joined.
Herein lies the concern. American-born citizens have not returned to their jobs since the pandemic lockdowns ended. Low participation among this group is due to a variety of factors that were either hastened or started by the pandemic.
Retirement-age workers chose to take their retirements early during the pandemic’s ensuing economic crisis. Working parents chose to prioritize their children at home over work, leading to an increase in home-schooling and a decrease in their workforce participation.
Most other workers who had no better excuse stayed home because the government incentivized them to by expanding provisions for subsidies like Obamacare and constant stimulus checks that paid better than the median wage.
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Rather than incentivize American-born citizens to return to work, Biden has paid them to stay home. And yet, he has the audacity to claim credit for a supposedly thriving economy that his predecessor supposedly ruined.
Biden’s incompetent control of migrant influxes has proven to be so catastrophic that American-born citizens are less encouraged to work than people who have never been here before, threatening the cultural identity of the state and the engine of its economy.
Parker Miller is a 2024 Washington Examiner winter fellow.