“as of May 2024, there were around 600,000 open positions in manufacturing (there’s almost 500,000 open today, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve), so there isn’t exactly a shortage of roles out there. Instead, there is a disconnect between how Americans in general think of manufacturing and how they view it for themselves. This is one reason why the National Association of Manufacturers and the former Secretary of the Navy under President Joe Biden both called for increased immigration, Grabow notes.
“Such jobs can’t find enough interested Americans to fill them,” he wrote.
Manufacturing workers themselves report “markedly” lower personal satisfaction with their jobs than other workers, according to the Pew Research Center. They also report less satisfaction with their pay, health insurance, and other benefits, and flexibility of their work hours.”
“The Trump administration’s massive federal cuts and swelling feelings of economic uncertainty helped fuel a recession-level spike in layoff plans last month, new data showed Thursday.
US-based employers last month announced plans to slash 172,017 jobs, a 103% increase from a year ago and the highest February total since 2009”
“If minimum wage increases were a drug, governments would have to conduct trials and monitor adverse effects afterward. That’s what happened in Seattle when it raised the minimum wage in 2014. The city called for proposals to study the impact on actual workers earning below the minimum before the law. The Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington was the only volunteer. Its researchers found that the law didn’t cause an increase in layoffs among workers who had previously earned below minimum wage, but it did reduce their hours by an average of 7 percent. That was partly offset by a 3 percent increase in hourly pay for the hours they did work. On net, the law cost these workers an average of $888 per year.
That amount is significant in itself, but it’s important to consider that it accounts for only the short-term effects. As mentioned above, some layoffs and hour reductions will happen immediately, but others—such as more businesses closing and fewer opening, or automation and other changes reducing employment—can take years. Another point is that the workers who benefited from higher pay were the ones most likely to have risen out of the minimum wage ranks to the middle class even without a mandated increase, while the workers who lost much more than $888 per year are more likely to be the ones blocked forever from economic advancement. In fact, the paper found that the workers who benefitted net were the most experienced and highest paid among the group–earning more than the old minimum but less than the new–while the less-experienced workers earning the old minimum or close to it, lost considerably more than the average.
Seattle legislators must have been unhappy with those findings because they cut funding for the Evans School and reached out to the same group at U.C. Berkeley that did the California minimum wage study to do its own distorted analysis, which was rushed out a week before the Evans study was made public. Eventually, Seattle raised the minimum wage again.”
“Son offered a similar commitment after Trump’s first presidential win in 2016, when Son pledged a $50 billion investment and the creation of 50,000 new jobs. But while SoftBank does seem to have followed through on its investment promise, it’s “unclear” that the jobs followed — a reminder that splashy announcements like Son’s latest should not necessarily be taken as iron-clad guarantees.
While CNN’s Allison Morrow and David Goldman found that SoftBank did invest roughly $75 billion in US companies after its first pledge, it “never made clear how many of those jobs it actually created — and how many were actually a result of a new investment,” they write.
Vox reached out to SoftBank for clarity on its previous investments and how many jobs they generated but did not receive a response prior to publication.
Other corporate investments that Trump touted in his first term had underwhelming returns as well. In the case of Foxconn, a Taiwanese manufacturer, for example, the company promised a $10 billion Wisconsin plant and 13,000 jobs, and fell short on both counts. An updated version of the deal eventually saw Foxconn reduce that figure to roughly 1,500 jobs.
According to a 2019 ProPublica investigation, multiple other corporations, including Alibaba and Broadcom, were also cited by the Trump administration as sources for new jobs, though many of these gains never materialized.
Such pledges, though, still have value to a president who once vowed to run the country like a business, regardless of their eventual success. They provide a good headline for Trump, and a chance to burnish his self-created image as a “dealmaker.”
Now that Trump is returning to power, business leaders are once more looking for ways to build influence with the administration, often with the goal of shaping favorable regulatory outcomes or government contracts. The SoftBank announcement suggests touting prominent job commitments, including those the company might not be able to deliver on, will continue to be one of those avenues.”
The United States is doing way better than seemed likely since the end of the Cold War as far as its economic power compared to the rest of the world. Improving efficiency rather than protecting jobs is the best way to maintain prosperity. The federal debt is a major concern.
“government data show immigrant labor contributes to economic growth and provides promotional opportunities for native-born workers. And a mass deportation event would cost U.S. taxpayers up to a trillion dollars and could cause the cost of living, including food and housing, to skyrocket, economists say.”
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“The latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey data shows that as of 2023, native-born Black workers are most predominantly employed in management and financial operations, sales and office support roles, while native-born Latino workers are most often employed in management, office support, sales and service occupations.
Foreign-born, noncitizen Black workers are most often represented in transportation and health care support roles, and foreign-born, noncitizen Hispanic workers are most often represented in construction, building and grounds cleaning.
How has immigration contributed to U.S. growth?
In 2023, international migrants — primarily from Latin America — accounted for more than two-thirds of the population growth in the United States, and so far this decade they have made up almost three-quarters of U.S. growth.
After hitting a record high in December 2023, the number of migrants crossing the border has plummeted.
The claim that immigrants are taking employment opportunities from native-born Americans is repeated by Trump’s advisers. They often cite a report produced by Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank that seeks a reduced immigration flow into the U.S. The report combines job numbers for immigrants in the U.S. legally and illegally to reinforce the claim that foreigners are disproportionately driving U.S. labor growth and reaping most of the benefits.
Camarota’s report states that 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans were employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019, prior to the pandemic, while the number of employed immigrants has increased by 3.2 million.
It is true that international migrants have become a primary driver of population growth this decade, increasing their share of the overall population as fewer children are being born in the U.S. compared with years past. That’s according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.
Are immigrants taking native-born workers’ jobs?
Economists who study immigrant labor’s impact on the economy say that people who are in the U.S. illegally are not taking native citizens’ jobs, because the roles that these immigrant workers take on are most often positions that native workers are unwilling to fill, such as agriculture and food processing jobs.
Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at the University of California, Davis, conducted research that explores the impact of the 1980 influx of Cuban immigrants in Miami (the so-called Mariel Boatlift) on Black workers’ employment. The study determined that the wages of Miami’s Black and Hispanic workers moved above those in other cities that did not have a surge of immigrant workers.
Peri told the AP that the presence of new immigrant labor often improves employment outcomes for native-born workers, who often have different language and skill sets compared to new immigrants.
In addition, there are not a fixed number of jobs in the U.S., immigrants tend to contribute to the survival of existing firms (opening up new opportunities for native workers) and there are currently more jobs available than there are workers available to take them. U.S. natives have low interest in working in labor-intensive agriculture and food production roles.
“We have many more vacancies than workers in this type of manual labor, in fact we need many more of them to fill these roles,” Peri said.
Stan Marek, who employs roughly 1,000 workers at his Houston construction firm, Marek Brothers Holdings LLC, said he has seen this firsthand.
Asked if immigrants in the U.S. illegally are taking jobs from native-born workers, he said, “Absolutely not, unequivocally.”
“Many of my workers are retiring, and their kids are not going to come into construction and the trades,” Marek said. He added that the U.S. needs an identification system that addresses national security concerns so those who are in the country illegally can work.
“There’s not enough blue-collar labor here,” he said.
Data also shows when there are not enough workers to fill these roles, firms will automate their jobs with machines and technology investments, rather than turn to native workers.”
“it’s misleading to suggest that the president—and by extension, the major political party to which the president belongs—is singularly or even primarily responsible for the success or failure of the job market. Rather, individuals in dynamic economies operate independently of the political party that happens to occupy the White House.
Clinton’s numbers are technically right: According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added 2.63 million nonfarm private sector jobs while George H.W. Bush was president. During Clinton’s two terms, the economy added 22.9 million jobs. Only 1.37 million jobs were added during George W. Bush’s terms, with another 11.57 million during Barack Obama’s tenure. During Donald Trump’s single term, the economy lost 2.72 million jobs, and in Joe Biden’s term through July 2024, the economy has added 15.81 million.
In total, that equals 51.56 million net jobs added since January 1989—50.28 million under Democratic presidents and 1.28 million under Republican presidents. That’s not the whole story, though.
Many of the presidents’ terms coincided with substantial external forces. Trump left office during a recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic: In his first three years in office, the economy actually added 6.4 million jobs. Similarly, George W. Bush left office amid the Great Recession, during which the economy shed nearly 7.4 million jobs. Calculating Bush’s term up to December 2007, the economy added 5.7 million jobs.
On the other hand, Clinton served during the dot-com boom. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite more than doubled between January 1999 and March 2000. But then the bubble burst: The economy entered a recession in March 2001, just weeks after Clinton left office, and the Nasdaq would lose 78 percent of its value between its March 2000 high and October 2002.”
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“National economies—particularly those as large and complex as ours—are dynamic, with an infinite number of inputs and externalities. “Month-to-month job creation is just a function of the dynamic U.S. economy that’s bigger than one person,” Chris Douglas, associate economics professor at the University of Michigan–Flint, told Marketplace in 2022. Central planning fails for this reason: Dynamic economies are driven by individuals, each operating only with his or her own knowledge and interests in mind.”