Immigration is “not poisoning the blood” of America, but is actually helping its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) greatly—and the numbers prove it.
That’s according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which calculated in a report released last month that immigration will generate a $7 trillion boost to the GDP over the next decade. The agency came to that conclusion after incorporating the recent surge in immigrants across the country.
Shocking, right? Donald Trumpeto, Greg “SB 4” Abbott, and the right-wing xenophobes will probably scream “fake news,” but as the saying goes, numbers don’t lie. Unless, of course, you are Trumpeto and you are lying about the billions you allegedly own—or not, as New York Attorney General Letitia James has uncovered.
But I digress. There is no “supposedly” or “allegedly” in the CBO’s numbers, which have economists from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase & Co., HSBC Holdings Plc., and BNP Paribas SA singing the same happy tune.
The buzz on Wall Street is from both more legal immigrants, as the U.S. goes through unprecedented visa backlogs, and the surge in illegal border crossings. The nation’s 32.5 million immigrant workers now account for roughly one in five U.S. workers, a record high in government data going back almost two decades.
The positive outlook came as the unemployment rate rose to a two-year high in February and businesses are ramping up calls for changes to bring in more workers through legal channels. Almost 9 million positions are open across the economy, equal to 1.4 jobs for every jobseeker. Foreign-born workers made up a record 18.6% of the civilian workforce in 2023 and the U.S. approved a record number of work authorizations in the fiscal year through last September.
“Immigration is not just a highly charged social and political issue; it is also a big macro-economic one,” wrote Janet Henry, global chief economist at HSBC Holdings Plc., in a note to clients last week, according to Bloomberg News. “No advanced economy is benefiting from immigration quite like the U.S., and the impact of migration has been an important part of the U.S. growth story over the past two years.”
Morgan Stanley economists Sam Coffin and Ellen Zentner also noted this month that faster population growth, fueled by immigration, lends itself to stronger employment and population estimates than initially thought, although they added that the full effect might not be captured by official data.
Goldman Sachs estimated that immigration was around 2.5 million in 2023, a figure that is far above the 1.6 million implied by the change in the foreign-born population in the official household survey from the Census Bureau.
To be sure, the connection between the higher influx of foreign workers and the rapid post-pandemic recovery has been noted by economists and policymakers alike for some time now. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has repeatedly cited immigration as one of the reasons behind strong U.S. economic growth. In a reference to the role being played by higher labor supply, Powell pointed last week to “a strong pace” of immigration as helping on that front.
“The overall picture is a strong labor market—the extreme imbalances we saw in the early parts of the pandemic recovery have mostly been resolved, you’re seeing high job growth, you’re seeing big increases in supply,” Powell said at a press conference, as federal policymakers lifted their growth forecast for this year to 2.1% from 1.4%, their median estimate showed.
The CBO report has the last word: It insists there is a need for an immigrant workforce to help the nation’s economy grow—otherwise, without immigration, the U.S. population is expected to shrink into 2040. And that’s a fact you can take to the bank!
Felicia J. Persaud is the publisher of NewsAmericasNow.com, a daily news outlet focusing on Black immigrant issues.