A record high wave of people quitting could be to blame for the impact of the current labor shortage on American businesses.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that there are 3 million fewer people working or looking for work in the US in February 2020. That's the labor shortage.
If we told you that the problem could be cut down to a third of its size, what would you think?
If immigration trends continued, there would be more working-age adults who would have lived in the United States.
Donald Trump's administration was more restrictive to immigration than any other administration in recent history.
About 2 million of America's missing workers are immigrants who never came to the US.
The Census Bureau estimates that about 1.07 million people came to the US on net in 2016 while only about 480,000 came in 2020.
The US gained an additional 54,000 net immigrants each year between 2011 and 2016 Net international migration began to decline between the years of 2017 and 2020. The US would have added 2.1 million immigrants over the four years if the trend continued.
The policies of the Trump administration are to blame for the missing workers.
The industries facing labor shortages would have benefited from immigrant workers if the policies of the Trump administration hadn't prevented them from entering the US.
The pro-immigration think tank New American Economy found that four industries are facing the worst labor shortages.
All four industries saw increases in job postings over the course of two years. Immigrants make up more than 20% of the workforce in those industries.
The National Association of Home Builders reported in March that immigrant workers make up 25% of the construction workforce. It's as much as 40% in states like California and Texas when it comes to construction workers. If they accounted for construction workers hired informally, the numbers would be even higher.
According to the National Foundation for American Policy, the Trump administration policies reduced legal immigration by about 50%. The policies projected that labor force growth would be lower.
After the start of the Pandemic, Trump issued more than 40 immigration policy changes, limiting legal roads to immigration and tightening rules for illegal immigrants.
He banned asylum seekers in March of last year, and re-implemented the policy throughout the year. Hearings for immigrants who were returned to Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols were indefinitely postponed.
There are record numbers of workers quitting. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4% of workers left their jobs in September. In August and July there were 4.3 million and 4 million. The US has seen mass resignations since the government started documenting them.
This labor shortage has been affecting American consumers as well, causing supply chain issues and price inflation, which recently hit a 30-year high in the U.S.
"When you don't have the truck drivers and we don't have the people that are working in construction, then economics says prices are going to go up," said Julie Palmer, a human resource professor.
