(Finance) – “Immigration has contributed to the exceptional nature of the United States economy in the post-pandemic scenario“. He supported it Marc GiannoniChief US Economist of Barclaysduring the presentation to the press of Barclays’ Global Outlook for the third quarter of 2024. In a report with the eloquent title “A powerful tailwind”, he explained that the increase in immigration has helped to stimulate economic growth, reduce inflation and fuel expectations of monetary easing.
L’net immigration in the United States reached a record high of 470,000 in December 2023 and a total of 4 million in the whole of 2023. The constant migratory flows have been a strong tailwind for aggregate supply that has helped sustain disinflation in a context of strong expansion fueled by consumption, it is explained.
According to data from the Barclays Immigration Tracker, US immigration has been fueled by asurge in humanitarian immigrantswhose contribution to total migratory flows went from 16% in 2014 to over 50% in 2023. Most of these are asylum seekers, who are eligible for a work permit after a period of at least 180 days under U.S. immigration law. Data indicates that most are young adults and families arriving across the southwestern U.S. border from a changing mix of Central and South American countries.
“Although this surge is politically unpopular, it has many desirable macroeconomic consequenceshelping to alleviate post-pandemic labor shortages and increase aggregate supply,” says Barclays, which estimates that net immigration increased the US population by 3.2 million in 2022 and the workforce by 2.1 million In 2023, these earnings have accelerated to 4.0 million and 2.5 million, respectively.
Although immigrants hold just over a fifth of all jobs, the estimate is that they accounted for approximately 75% of the increase in employment in the private sector in the last year. Furthermore, hours worked by immigrants contributed to nearly a third of output growth over that period, more than offsetting the slowdown in hours worked by the U.S.-born, with the rest explained by productivity growth.