Dip in immigration seen driving U.S. inflation

Close to 15% of job openings that employ immigrant or foreign-born workers in the U.S. are still vacant, while the legal immigration system is in dire straits. From meat packing to home building to STEM professionals to nurses, the post-pandemic economy is reeling from a labor force decimated by restrictive immigration policies, which worsened under Donald Trump’s administration.

The halting of immigration“From the middle of 2019 until the end of 2021, there has been essentially zero net immigration to the U.S,” said Giovanni Peri, Ph.D. Professor of Economics and Founder and Director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, citing US Bureau census data.

“Although in late 2021 and early 2022 these numbers started growing again, the fact that the inflow of immigrants stopped made the country lose more than 1.7 million (immigrants),” added Peri, noting that 900,000 of them would have been college educated who work in the STEM sector — doctors, computer scientists, biomedical engineers, bio experts — and 800,000 would have been non-college educated concentrated in sectors such as food, hospitality, elderly and child care. “We are talking about the 1.1% of the US labor force,” Peri added.

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