If it weren’t for people coming to the US from abroad, the US labour pool would probably be smaller today than it was before the Great Recession.
Put another way: If the number of people available to work in America after the 2007-2009 Great Recession had continued to grow at the same rate as before the recession, there would be many more people available to fill jobs.
Why? Baby boomers and immigrants.
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Baby boomers have retired and left the labour pool. And immigrants have helped fill the gap.
“If we had the same growth rate we had before the Great Recession, the working-age population would be about 11% higher than it is today,” says Frederico Mandelman, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
The number of people in their prime working years, between 25 and 54, has barely moved in the past decade – it only began to rise after the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the number of foreign-born people in this working age group has increased by six per cent.
Florida’s labour force is heavily influenced by immigrant workers. While the US-born workforce has grown by about 30% over the past two decades, the number of foreign-born workers in Florida has more than doubled to 2.8 million.
With more than one in four people working in Florida born outside the country, this means that Florida’s economy has a higher proportion of non-U.S.-born workers than the nation as a whole. And the Southeast region of the US has more foreign-born workers than any other region in the country except the West Coast. And it has the lowest unemployment rate for foreign-born workers in the country.
Florida’s workforce has grown slowly over the past 20 years, but the share of prime-age workers has shrunk. As a percentage of the population, young people under the age of 26 and workers in their prime earning years – mid-30s to mid-50s – have declined.
Florida’s reputation as a magnet for retirees is well deserved. The fastest-growing age group in Florida in recent years has been people 65 and older. They are much less likely to be working and instead are creating demand for services such as health care.
All this adds up to a declining share of people participating in the labour market, except for people born overseas. About two-thirds of the foreign-born population consider themselves to be part of the labour market.
The term ‘foreign-born’ in the data includes legally admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and workers, and undocumented immigrants.
The number of undocumented immigrants in the US has been fairly stable in recent years, falling since the Great Recession 15 years ago. Even as the economy picked up after the housing crash, undocumented workers did not flood the labour market in traditional jobs.
“But as the economy started to recover, and it was a long expansionary process, by 2016-17 you could clearly see that there were some shortages in those occupations. It was very, very difficult to find a childcare worker or a construction worker,” says Mandelman.
And those shortages have persisted, with the regional unemployment rate hovering near historic lows for months.
