President Joe Biden is projected to hugely boost the foreign-born workforce in the United States, adding about half a million to fill American jobs while tens of millions of Americans remain out of the labor market entirely.
Analysis from Goldman Sachs economists projects Biden’s ramping up the nation’s legal immigration system — which brings more than a million foreign nationals to the United States on green cards annually in addition to another million on temporary work visas — will add about 500,000 foreign workers to the workforce by mid-June of next year.
Monthly, the economists note, Biden is inflating the labor market with tens of thousands of foreign workers employers can hire, often at lower wages and with fewer benefits.
“… growth in the foreign-born labor force has accelerated by 50k to 160k per month this year, lifted by a surging foreign-born labor force participation rate (LFPR),” they write.
The ultimate result of adding millions of foreign workers to the workforce every few years, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hinted at last month, is “rebalancing” the labor market so as not to be weighted in favor of employees but instead employers.
Keeping wages down is part of that result as well.
“This rebalancing has eased wage pressures,” Powell said. “Wage growth across a range of measures continues to slow, albeit gradually.”
The projection comes as the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) recently revealed that, as of April, more than 44 million native-born Americans remain on the labor market sidelines — not including the millions of native-born Americans counted in monthly unemployment figures.
The decline in the native-born American labor force participation rate of the last two decades is juxtapositioned against a growing number of foreign-born workers in the workforce.
From 1960 to 2023, for instance, the number of native-born American men 16 to 64 years old not in the labor market increased by nearly 14 million. Over that same period, the number of foreign-born workers 16 to 64 years old in the labor market increased by 13.7 million.
The trend is most prominent among the nation’s working and lower-middle classes.
“… the share of U.S.-born men 20 to 64 without a bachelor’s shows a decline in labor force participation from 93 percent in 1960 to 87 percent in 1980, 84.1 percent in 2000, and 77.3 percent in April of this year,” CIS researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler write.
Meanwhile, foreign-born men from 20 to 64 years old without a bachelor’s degree have seen their labor force participation rate decline since 2006, but it still remains higher than native-born American working-class men.
In April, 85.8 percent of foreign-born, working class men were in the workforce — nearly 10 percent more than native-born American working-class men.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at
