Today’s Wall Street Journal lead story, “How Immigrants Have Reshaped the U.S. Workforce,” uses data to try to understand the impact of immigration on the U.S. economy, but it does a good job digging through a wide range of sources, including immigration court records, a KFF Health News/Los Angeles Times survey, CBO data, and Census Bureau surveys.
On the one hand (and I admit this reflects the propensity of these sources to get drunk and go into information gathering mode under streetlights), these tallies are inherently suspect, given how large the illegal immigrant population is relative to the overall population, and how most of them understandably try to stay under the radar. Even with less-than-ideal information, the article points to the reason for the early controversy: the influx has increased significantly under the Biden administration.
Since the start of 2021, net immigration to the U.S. has reached about 9.3 million people, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.
This is more than three times the net number of people who entered the country in the previous four years.
This diagram illustrates the essence of the problem.
Clarify categories through interactive charts.
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Lawful permanent residents, commonly referred to as green card holders, have a relatively stable net inflow from year to year for this group.
Non-immigrant groups include temporary workers, international students, foreign government employees, etc. A negative net immigration figure for a group means that the number of people leaving the U.S. or changing status has decreased from the previous year.
The largest net increase was in the other aliens category, which includes people who entered the U.S. unnoticed and those who entered the U.S. on parole and are awaiting hearings in immigration court.
Before I go any further, I want to say that I am very skeptical of the supposed accuracy of this article. Conservatives who claim that the number of illegal immigrants could be much higher than estimated are out of their minds. I think it is a graph crime to include such a vague figure in a graph from a figure taken from a population for which the authorities have much more certain numbers. There is no way (and no attempt) in any of the many graphs and tables to show that the data for illegal immigrants has a significantly higher margin of error than the data for other groups.
For example, in the early 2000s, a division at American Express asked me to identify long-term trends that they should take note of or exploit in their marketing strategies. Of course, there are plenty of companies and experts who pretend to do just that. They asked me to sift through a sea of predictions to choose the ones that seemed plausible.
One of the three I identified was demographic change. This research was done shortly after the 2000 census results were released. Demographers were shocked by the size of the population increase. They had expected the United States to only grow slightly, following the example of other developed countries where birth rates were declining. The much larger-than-expected increase was primarily due to the magnitude of illegal immigration, which had not been recognized until now, and secondarily, due to a failure to fully account for the growth of the Hispanic population, which has a higher birth rate.
The fact that so many experts were surprised by this change tells me just how badly the information was collected, and how inherently difficult it is to come up with much better results. No doubt there is a concerted effort underway to come up with better estimates, but those estimates are always going to be very vague.
That said, many of the findings seem intuitively sound, but when I was at McKinsey, studies would occasionally try to give theories more solid evidence by presenting them in graphs, and I would argue that the graphs should be labeled “McKinsey intuition.”
Again, these tables have some merit, but stronger caveats are needed. So while I view these tables as probably directionally correct, I am cautious about citing figures. The scale of illegal immigration is so large and so difficult to measure with confidence that it is difficult to generalize to the entire immigrant population. If the critics are right and the number of illegal immigrants is much larger than the estimates here, this problem is exacerbated.
Below are some examples based on the Census Bureau’s monthly household surveys. We acknowledge that the journals may be incomplete.
Fewer immigrants from 2020 onwards are taking part in the monthly census, and demographers believe undocumented immigrants are less likely to respond when the government calls and asks questions.
But by looking at the people who respond to the census each month, we can make some inferences about their characteristics.
A small sample size also reduces reliability.
As the article explains:
Recent immigrants are younger and more likely to be of working age than native-born Americans: Monthly Census data show that 78% of foreigners who arrived since 2020 are between the ages of 16 and 64, compared with 60% of the native-born.
This also explains why they are more likely to join the labor force: Among recent immigrants age 16 and older, 68% (participation rate) are working or looking for work, compared with 62% of native-born Americans. The actual figure is probably more than 5 million people, or about 3% of the labor force.
This article also discusses how using different sampling methods with different data sources can lead to different conclusions.
According to TRAC data, the top 12 countries of origin for new immigrants assigned to immigration court hearings since the second half of 2020 were Latin American or Caribbean: Venezuela at 14%, Mexico at 13% and Honduras at 8.5%.
Monthly census data paint a slightly different picture, with Mexico being the most common country of origin, followed by Venezuela and India.
Admittedly, the comments in this article have their own sample bias, but it was instructive to see that there are arguments against illegal immigration in order to support American wages and provide stronger Social Security benefits.
Claude King
Yet another misleading article from the WSJ claims that illegal immigration hurts low-income earners and reduces the quality of available workers.
We need legal immigration, and we need energy policies that support domestic production.
Our government has put the interests of globalists above our national interests.
Instead of cutting good jobs and rights used to buy votes, they hide behind cheaper prices and lower quality.
Some people objected to not including other sources (I haven’t verified the accuracy of the assertions below, but a fairly heated series of comments did spark no backlash).
Mickey Murray
This article is incorrect because it states the total number of immigrants in 2024 is less than 4 million. The exact year-to-date number is over 8 million, according to the Department of Homeland Security. If you include known and unknown fugitives, the actual number is much higher, so it is well over 10 million.
The article portrays immigrants as having a higher average skill level than natives who do not have a high school diploma, but also a slightly higher percentage of those with a college education. Comments on skill levels:
John Tiffmire
I have hired many illegal immigrants who have immigrated to my area. Many are hardworking, but incredibly incompetent. They don’t even know how to paint a house or dig a hole, much less a profession that requires some skill and training. If there are millions of new workers who don’t speak much English and have very low skills, who is going to pay for the training and upskilling of these people? Furthermore, because these people are illegal, they have endless problems navigating life in the United States. To give you an example, a Honduran worker I hired needed diabetes medicine. He thought it was a prescription that wasn’t available in the United States, so he had his daughter send it from Honduras, but UPS put the package on hold because they couldn’t verify who the recipient was. He couldn’t get it through UPS customs, so I helped him, but it turned out that UPS was paying him hundreds of dollars for an herbal cream that you can buy on Amazon for $25 and have shipped by tomorrow. This little experience taught me that life as an illegal worker is simply not possible for millions of people to be in this condition forever. So I conclude that at some point, Americans are going to have to recognize that this is reality, and they’re going to have to accept that all of these people will be legal Americans at some point. It’s going to take until we have the next Democratic President, House and Senate. That’s reality.
The claim that illegal immigrants will eventually be regularized is debatable. I once had a friend who was partway through the legal immigration process, but the process stalled when his American wife stopped cooperating. President Obama developed an amnesty program, and he joked that he would be the only one to qualify, since it would require all tax liability. He had gone as far as getting a Social Security number and was compliant. I think the tax requirement will continue to be an issue.
And one reader fired back, challenging the possibility of labour exploitation.
Mark Jones
Look at Europe, which is dividing itself to get what you want.
Look at yourself. Is this being generous on your part, or just greedy? Do you pay the illegal immigrants you hire enough to allow them to live without subsidized housing or food? Do you enroll them all in health programs so they and their families can pay for what they need when they get sick or injured? Do you donate to the local school district so that the extra educational services their children need aren’t a burden on taxpayers?
I’ve been listening to this rap my whole life, and it always sounds great, but when you flip it over and take a closer look, the picture changes.
These comments aren’t a huge change, but they do seem to offer a much lower level of defense of immigration as a good than I’ve seen in the Journal in the past. The comments also included a Brexit-reminiscent view that both high-wage and low-wage immigrants contribute to high house prices. So at least the level of cheesy slogans versus somewhat reasoned arguments was an improvement over what I’ve seen in the Journal before. This could be considered progress of some kind.
