News Clip: The economy is roaring. Immigration is a key reason.

Momentum in the job market picked up aggressively over the past year — all while Washington is deadlocked on a border deal

WASHINGTON POST: Immigration has propelled the U.S. job market further than just about anyone expected, helping cement the country’s economic rebound from the pandemic as the most robust in the world.

That momentum picked up aggressively over the past year. About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data. 

And even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.  

“Immigration has not slowed. It has just been absolutely astronomical,” said Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “And that’s been instrumental. You can’t grow like this with just the native workforce. It’s not possible.”

Editor’s Note: The above news story first appeared in The Washington Post on Feb. 27, 2024. It was written by reporters Rachel Siegel, Lauren Kaori Curley and Meryl Kornfield. Reporter Nick Miroff contributed. Click here to read the full story.

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