Adam Tooze refers to these figures below as “the coming labor market shock.”
If the Trump administration stops or, more likely, cuts back drastically on the inflow of working age immigrants, the impact on workforce supply will be significant. That is because the U.S. born workforce is declining, and a healthy economy needs to fill a net increase of at least two million jobs a year. If he removes hundreds of housands of immigrant workers, there may be an acute worker shortage in some industries.
By combining data from different sources, I estimate that:
In 2022, 4.8 million jobs were created, largely due to a rebound from the pandemic. In 2023, 3 million jobs were created. In 2024, 2.2 million jobs were created. (All of these net increases.) for the three years: 10 million jobs.
In these three years, 6 million, or 60% of these jobs were filled by recent immigrants. Half of these by asylum applicants and Parole or Temporary Protected Status persons. About one million were those with legal non-humanitarian temporary visas such as H-1B. About 1.5 million were unlawful entry or visa overstays.
In the past ten or so years, the number of U.S. born persons of working age has been shrinking by about 300,000 a year. Thus the only way that job growth was a large as it was, was at least half due to immigration and the rest due to Americans returning to work after an involuntary or voluntary absence.