Biden’s Labor Market: 44M Americans Out of Workforce While Foreign Workers Hold More U.S. Jobs than Ever
President Joe Biden’s use of mass immigration to inflate the nation’s labor market comes as more than 44 million working age Americans are out of the workforce altogether, not including those counted as unemployed, data reveals.
The labor data, published on August 21 by Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler at the Center for Immigration Studies, shows that while Biden adds millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens to the United States population who now hold jobs, working age Americans — especially those among the working class — are falling out of the workforce at an alarming pace.
As of April, the number of American-born men and women from 16 to 64 years old who are not in the workforce at all stands at 44.3 million — almost ten million more than the year 2000, when 34.4 million were not in the workforce.
That figure, though, does not include the millions of United States-born men and women who are considered unemployed.
Chart via the Center for Immigration Studies
For six decades, the labor force participation rate among American men has been dramatically declining.
In 1960, for example, the share of United States-born men from 16 to 64 years old in the workforce was 88.7 percent. In 2000, it had dropped to 83.7 percent and by April 2023 it stood at 77.5 percent. If the same share of these men were in the labor force today as were in 1960, there would be another 9.5 million American-born men for hire.
Among working-class men, the drop is even steeper.
From 1960 to 2023, the labor participation rate among men without a bachelor’s degree declined by nearly 17 percentage points.
Camarota and Zeigler write:
This is relevant to the immigration debate because one of the arguments for allowing in so many legal immigrants, or even tolerating illegal immigration, is that the low unemployment rate, along with the aging of the U.S. population, means there are not enough workers. But this ignores the enormous increase in the number of working-age people not in the labor force who do not show up as unemployed because they are not actively looking for work.
Chart via the Center for Immigration Studies
As Breitbart News reported in May, the Biden administration has brought in so many legal immigrants and illegal aliens that foreign workers now account for the largest share of United States job holders since the numbers have been tracked.
In 2022, foreign workers saw their share of the labor market hit the highest level in almost 30 years at more than 18 percent, with close to 30 million now holding U.S. jobs.
“Policy-makers should consider encouraging work among the millions on the economic sidelines rather than ignoring the problem and continuing to allow in large numbers of immigrants,” Camarota and Zeigler write.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Feds: Washington Farm Used H-2A Visa Program to Import Cheaper Foreign Workers
Executives at a farm in Sunnyside, Washington, allegedly used the H-2A visa program to import cheaper foreign workers and then subsequently paid them below-market wages, federal officials say.
Months ago, the Washington Attorney General’s Office reached a $3.4 million settlement with Ostrom Mushroom Farms for allegedly firing its mostly female farmworkers and replacing them with mostly male foreign workers who arrived on H-2A visas — the federal program that allows United States farms to import a limitless number of foreign workers.
According to the Los Angeles Times, “prosecutors and workers say the company was trying to replace local employees with foreign workers who could be paid less and were willing to work longer hours.”
The Times continued:
It wasn’t long before new workers, mostly men, were bused into the farm in vans, taking the place of the fired women. Some of the new pickers looked like they were no more than 15 years old, several current and former workers at the farm told The Times.
“Little by little, they’re getting rid of the local workers,” said Cabrera, who worried the job she had for more than two years was at risk. “They fired people without saying anything, just gone.”
In one particular case, a foreign H-2A visa worker imported by the farm told the Times that he was 17 years old when he started working at the farm and would work up to 15 hours a day. If foreign visa workers spoke out against their employment conditions, they would be retaliated against, prosecutors claimed.
Last week, the Department of Labor announced that it had secured nearly $60,000 in unpaid wages for foreign visa workers whom Ostrom Mushroom Farms allegedly took from as well as nearly $75,000 in civil penalties for violating the terms of the H-2A visa program.
That Labor Department settlement comes just a week after a New Jersey-based farm was made to pay more than half a million in back wages that the agency claims it stole from foreign H-2A visa workers.
As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, the program is often used to replace Americans and preserve the low cost of agricultural labor.
In 1997, a little more than 16,000 foreign H-2A visa workers were imported to take American agriculture jobs. The latest data shows that in the first half of fiscal year 2023, which runs from October 2022 through March 2023, U.S. farms imported nearly 200,000 foreign H-2A visa workers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
MasterLock–Outsourcing Milwaukee Jobs–Sets Backdrop for GOP Debate
For months, Americans employed at the MasterLock factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have been protesting against the corporation’s plans to outsource their jobs — reportedly to Mexico — with little-to-no attention from lawmakers.
On Wednesday, eight Republican presidential hopefuls will debate policy issues in Milwaukee in the primary’s first debate, hosted by Fox News.
It remains unclear whether hosts will ask about the plight of the city’s MasterLock employees or if any candidates will mention the issue of corporations continuing to gut working and middle class American communities with outsourcing schemes, often with no repercussions from the federal government.
As Breitbart News reported in May, MasterLock executives announced their plans to lay off more than 400 employees at the Milwaukee factory and close it after 102 years of operation. The jobs, according to the United Auto Workers (UAW), will be sent to other existing plants in North America — mainly, Mexico, where labor laws go unenforced and wages remain low.
The outsourcing scheme was finalized this month and the factory will close in early 2024. The first round of layoffs will start in November.
Former President Donald Trump made outsourcing a staple of his populist platform in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Most recently, he suggested that he wants across-the-board 10 percent tariffs on all foreign imports to the United States in an effort to restore American manufacturing jobs and those jobs in supporting industries.
“When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let’s say a 10 percent tax … I do like the 10 percent for everybody,” Trump told Fox Business Channel last week.
Trump, though, will not be attending the debate in Milwaukee and will instead appear in a pre-recorded interview hosted by Tucker Carlson. Beyond tariffs, Trump has not said how he would punish companies for outsourcing.
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and former Vice President Mike Pence — both of whom are attending the debate — have previously backed tariffs but, like Trump, have yet to say if and how they would punish corporations that outsource American jobs.
DeSantis, last month, said he supports a plan to revoke China’s free trade status with the U.S., which would slap immediate tariffs on imports from the communist country. The move would force outsourcers to rework supply chains, potentially moving them back to the U.S., so as not to get hit with big tariff costs.
In October 2020, Pence touted the rounds of tariffs that the Trump administration imposed on foreign imports and warned that President Joe Biden would eliminate them. Since then, though, Pence has been largely quiet on the trade issue.
Other candidates, like businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, have been unclear about how they would go about returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S. and keeping them — focusing largely on criticizing the nation’s dependence on China.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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