Donald Trump’s new promise of 25 million new jobs, outlined in his reconfigured economic blueprint, appears to be on a collision course with another of his major campaign initiatives: the drive to dramatically reshape the nation’s immigration system.
With aging baby boomers retiring in droves, Trump would need a massive infusion of legal immigration to fill the newly created jobs he envisions, according to several economists from across the political spectrum.
“He can’t get to 25 million given the number of bodies that will be around,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum and the economic policy director for Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign. “His immigration and trade policies are anti-growth, which is why I think he won’t hit his targets.”
Our population is growing because of immigration.
Mark Zandi, chief economist, Moody’s Analytics
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, thinks Trump’s “arithmetic doesn’t work.” He estimates that Trump would need to “more than double” current legal immigration levels to provide enough labor to fill the 25 million jobs over 10 years and compensate for the loss of retired baby boomers.
A 2010 Pew Research Center study found that about 10,000 baby boomers – people ages of 51 to 66 – turn 65 every day, with many leaving the workforce. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the labor force participation rate will drop to 60.2 percent in 2026 from today’s 62.7 percent, due, in part, to population trends.
But Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, called talk of a dwindling American workforce a canard pushed by “economists who’ve never seen an immigration expansion that they didn’t like.”
“Trump’s policies aren’t contradictory at all,” said Beck, whose group supports reduced immigration. “There’s no labor shortage and there’s not one on the horizon. Trump’s economic plan is incredibly ambitious, and people would love it if it happens.”
Trump’s position is there is no labor shortage and there won’t be one on the horizon.
Roy Beck, head of NumbersUSA
Currently, about a million immigrants enter the United States legally each year, according to Mark Hugo Lopez, director of the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic research. He estimated that at least 30 million legal immigrants wouldn’t enter the U.S. under Trump’s proposals through 2065.
In a speech Thursday, Trump vowed to add 25 million jobs – about 2.5 million a year over a decade – by boosting the economy with a combination of deregulation, new spending and tax cuts.
He has put his policies on immigration – both illegal and legal – in an economic context, arguing that foreign-born workers are taking jobs from unemployed Americans.
On his campaign website, Trump calls for a “pause” on issuing green cards and says “employers will have to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers.”
In addition, Trump said in a speech in Arizona earlier this month that he wanted an immigration commission to develop a new system that would “keep immigration levels, measured by population share, within historical norms” and “select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society,” and “establish new immigration controls to boost wages and to ensure that open jobs are offered to American workers first.”
That’s a problem, Zandi argues, because without an increase in immigration “the population and labor force will go flat.”
William Douglas: 202-383-6026, @williamgdouglas
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