Two men speak softly in Spanish in one of the cars of the A line of the New York City Subway. Weighed down by large backpacks — construction helmets hanging from the side — they’re heading into Manhattan. A third man takes advantage of the commute to rest his eyes as he heads in from Brooklyn. Nearby, two women — wearing the uniforms of healthcare workers — scroll through their phones and make comments to each other: one has a Latin accent, the other Jamaican.
It’s 5.30 a.m. on a workday in the spring. The train is a small sample of a country that fills a high percentage of its jobs with applicants who arrive from beyond the borders of the United States.
Figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that, in April of 2024, immigrants represented 19.2% of the US workforce. That’s a record and an increase of two percentage points from before the pandemic. But the true figure may be even higher. “There are projections from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and other studies that suggest that the growth of the non-native labor force has been stronger than what’s captured by the BLS data,” says Nancy Vanden Houten, chief economist for the US at Oxford Economics.
The group has just published a study in which she assesses the economic impacts of the proposals put forward by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. This is in the event that he wins another term and imposes stronger limits on both legal and irregular immigration. The former…
