Not immigrating to the USA. Immigration to the USA has dropped severely since we closed our borders more than they used to be.
Major reason why we have low unemployment and millions of unfilled jobs
- Thread starter T. A. Gardner
- Start date
Not immigrating to the USA. Immigration to the USA has dropped severely since we closed our borders more than they used to be.
People who are against immigration don’t realize how much it impacts us.
People who are against immigration don't care. They see anyone who is not white as a sponge soaking up the money that would have made them rich. They are angry about that, and their anger drives every belief they have. The GOP has figured this out, and they now engage in actions designed to inflame the base. Culture wars. They LIVE for the hatred that is required to fight them. The OP is a perfect example of this.
It turns out, that didn't actually work the way its proponents were hoping. The thing to remember is that the key provision in that Act that the Republicans were expecting to drive people to work was a five-year lifetime limit on benefits. Since it didn't become law until August 1996, and the countdown didn't start until the beginning of the following year, the first people didn't start getting thrown off welfare due to hitting the limit until early 2002. That means the vast run-up in labor participation rates of the Clinton years happened before the time limits were being imposed on anyone, and the slow decline in labor participation rates in the years since then have been what we've seen when time limits were a factor.
As for the impact of the Trump Plague, I suspect that the rescue money for people impacted by COVID hasn't been a big factor in labor participation being down somewhat relative to before the pandemic. Retirements have been more of a factor.
Think of it this way. Among those age 25-54, currently 79.9% are working. That's EXTREMELY high, in historical terms. In Trump's entire presidency, we only had seven months with that high a share of prime-aged workers working. The average for his era was just 78.4%. You brought up the Clinton era, but that's literally the ONLY presidential era in all of American history where an average of more than 79.9% of people in that block held jobs at any given point. The vaunted Reagan era saw an average of just 76.2%. In the Eisenhower years, it was just 65.3%.
So, we're not talking about a situation where it makes sense to be focused on why so many are content to sit on their butts not working (unless we're talking about the elderly), but rather an era when the question is why such a large share of the prime-working-aged population actually has jobs.