[Dallas Morning News] The pandemic hammered the U.S. economy, revealing serious labor shortages. Now economists are highlighting a major factor: disappearing immigrant workers, both unauthorized and with visas.
There's two kinds of migrants again?
"This is bad for Texas’ economy, just like it’s bad for the economy in every other part of the United States," said Alex Nowrasteh, director of policy and economic studies at the libertarian-centric Cato Institute. "People fuel economic growth and without more people, our economy is going to stagnate and eventually shrink."
Unless we all die from the deadly coronavirus first.
Nowrasteh estimates that 1.6 million to 3.2 million immigrant workers would have been added to the labor mix had the economy continued on its go-go 2016 trajectory, when a high of 1,065,000 migrants came to the U.S. from other countries, according to the Census Bureau.
That was the Obama economy, in 2016. More migrants in 2016? The legal ones, perhaps.
The bureau says net migration fell to 247,000 last year.
I bet the Border Patrol would beg to differ.
Giovanni Peri, director of the Global Migration Project at the University of California, Davis, estimates that 2 million immigrant workers are missing from the U.S. economy.
Don't worry - the Border Patrol found them.
He and other experts say the labor shortage has several causes: a decline in All are fallout from the wallop COVID-19 has delivered on the nation.
None of it due to media spin or Bidenomics.
"This is so hard to just turn around quickly," Peri said. He believes the labor shortages will persist for 18 months to two years.
Unless we all die of the deadly coronavirus first.