Employment Data Indicate Hiring Freeze, More Jobs Going to Immigrants

For many Americans, this means that the abundance of job opportunities they had recently enjoyed may be coming to an end.
“There is no significant indication that conditions are going to improve anytime soon. In fact, the available evidence points to continued deteriorating in the labor market.”
However, while many economists saw indications of a coming recession in recent employment data, some saw reasons for optimism.
“[The labor market] is cooling, but it’s not cracking,” Fred Ashton, director of competition policy at the American Action Forum, a nonprofit research organization, told The Epoch Times.
“We’re not seeing any uptick in layoffs, which would be very worrisome,” Ashton said. “It’s just a slowdown in hiring reflective of the long and variable lags of tight monetary policy.”
The BLS definition of foreign-born workers includes those who entered the country legally and illegally. The labor participation rate for native-born Americans fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of those jobs have since been filled by foreign-born workers, though that trend may be starting to slow.
“But it really has been the immigrant population that has been the biggest supplier of labor.”
While quit rates have remained high in 2024, hiring rates have remained high as well, until recently.
When asked what employers could do to keep them, workers said higher pay (38 percent), remote work (34 percent), and improved workplace culture (33 percent).
One possible silver lining to the slowdown in hiring may be that the productivity of the American worker is increasing.
The BLS reported on Sept. 5 that non-farm labor productivity increased by 2.5 percent during the second quarter of 2024. During the same period in 2023, productivity increased by 2.7 percent.
Labor productivity, measured in terms of output per hour, is calculated by dividing an index of real output by an index of hours worked by all workers. Increases in worker productivity could lead to future increases in real wages, for those who have jobs.
While speaking on Aug. 23, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell stated that “four and a half years after COVID-19’s arrival, the worst of the pandemic-related economic distortions are fading,” adding that “inflation has declined significantly.”
“It seems unlikely that the labor market will be a source of elevated inflationary pressures anytime soon,” Powell said. “We do not seek or welcome further cooling in labor market conditions.”
“It does appear that we’re headed into a recession, and might be in one already, but that has become a very difficult call to make in a post–pandemic world where so many economic metrics have become unreliable due to the violent government interventions that began in 2020 and continued for a couple of years thereafter,” Antoni said.