US should embrace pro-immigration policy: WSJ opinion
- Study: The U.S. could have six million fewer working-age people by 2040
- A WSJ opinion piece suggests a pro-immigration policy shift is the answer
- Some Americans view foreign workers as 'cheap competition'
FILE – An employee works in the X3 X4 assembly hall at the BMW Spartanburg plant in Greer, S.C. Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2022. A wave of retirements, a drop in legal immigration, and hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths have left the U.S. with a smaller workforce than when the pandemic began two and half years ago, a change that could bolster wage growth and inflation and force the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates higher for longer. (AP Photo/Sean Rayford, File)
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(NewsNation) — Attracting workers from abroad is the answer to America’s shrinking labor force, an opinion piece by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board posits.
“The working-age U.S. population has peaked absent additional immigration,” Madeline Zavodny writes in a forthcoming paper from the National Foundation for American Policy. “New international migrants are the only potential source of growth in the U.S. working-age population over the remainder of the next two decades.”
Zavodny, an economics professor at the University of North Florida, based her analysis on data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to the WSJ.
The piece explains a sliding birth rate is partially responsible for the declining workforce. According to a new study, by 2040, the U.S. could have more than six million fewer working-age people than in 2022.
The other reason identified is that Baby Boomers are living longer and “aging out” of the workforce.
Despite some Americans seeing foreign workers as competition, Zavodny argues immigration was “the sole source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in 2021 and 2022.”
