Even a broken clock, the old saying goes, is right twice a day. So it was for Donald Trump during his 2019 State of the Union address on Tuesday night. During perhaps the most backward-looking presidential message in memory, the president thundered about a mythical national crisis of undocumented immigration putting America and Americans at risk. But wedged into his tirade about the supposedly “dangerous” threat to “the safety, security, and financial well-being of all America” posed by this “tremendous onslaught” at our southern border, Trump also offered this very forward-looking statement:
Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways. I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally. [Emphasis mine]
A quick glance at his remarks as prepared for delivery shows Trump ad-libbed that hopeful clause. But on Wednesday, the president doubled-down on his born-again vision for greatly expanded legal immigration so out-of-step with his record and past rhetoric. Asked by a reporter from The Advocate of Louisiana if his statement represented “a change of policy,” Trump responded:
“Yes, because we need people in our country because our unemployment numbers are so low…I need people coming because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in. We need people.”
Leaving aside for the moment Trump’s dubious claims about companies “moving back” to the United States, he happens to be onto something about the future needs of the American economy. After all, the U.S. birthrate has plummeted to its lowest level in 30 years, exacerbating the aging of the American population now well underway. And as it turns out, barring some major breakthrough in American productivity, dramatically increasing the number of immigrants welcomed each year to the United States is the only way Donald Trump can deliver on his goal of 4 percent annual economic growth.
Unless the U.S. labor force grows much more quickly, CBO forecasts GDP growth at half Trump’s target.
To be sure, Trump’s spur-of-the-moment reversal caught immigration foes by surprise. “My first reaction was alarm,” said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies told Bloomberg. “My second reaction, quickly thereafter, was this was the kind of empty superlative that the president inserts practically into every other sentence.” He has a point, and not just because Donald Trump has similarly promised to provide health “insurance for everybody” and the commander in chief proclaimed “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.” Trump’s bid to admit new immigrants “in the largest numbers ever” flies in the face of everything the man’s said for years.
On Feb. 28, 2017, Trump complained:
“Protecting our workers also means reforming our system of legal immigration. The current, outdated system depresses wages for our poorest workers and puts great pressure on our taxpayers.”
On August 2, 2017, five months before the president of the United States asked, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” Trump announced his support for the RAISE Act. And just what does the “Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy” Act, co-sponsored by Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia seek to do?
The Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act (RAISE Act) would spur economic growth and help raise working Americans’ wages ending chain migration, giving priority to the most skilled immigrants from around the world, and reducing overall immigration by half. [Emphasis mine.]
In January 2018, Trump and Vice President Pence hosted Cotton, Perdue, and other GOP senators for an immigration strategy session. Far from declaring anything like “we need people,” Trump slammed the roughly 1.2 million immigrants legally coming to the United States each year:
The lottery system is a disaster. Tom and I talk about it all the time. They put down their probably worst people — who knows. But they’re not looking to get rid of their best people, so they put their worst people in the hopper, and we’re picking out the people. And then we find out: What do we have? It’s not a good situation. So we’re going to end it. The lottery system has to be laughed at by countries outside of our country when they send these people in.
And the Trump White House’s hard line toward legal immigration hardly ends there. As NBC News reported last August:
The Trump administration is expected to issue a proposal in coming weeks that would make it harder for legal immigrants to become citizens or get green cards if they have ever used a range of popular public welfare programs, including Obamacare, four sources with knowledge of the plan told NBC News.
The move, which would not need congressional approval, is part of White House senior adviser Stephen Miller's plan to limit the number of migrants who obtain legal status in the U.S. each year.
As The Atlantic explained a year ago, all of the talk about “skilled immigrants” is just a smokescreen for slashing legal immigration altogether:
Within that smaller pool of immigrants, high-skilled workers could very well comprise a larger share than they do now. But if that shift were to happen, it would only be because immigration levels would fall even faster for those who are lower-skilled.
“They are not talking about immigrating 1 million scientists and engineers,” said Stuart Anderson, the executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy and a former immigration aide to two Republican senators. “It’s completely untrue that it would bring in more skilled immigrants. The purpose of this from the beginning has been to cut legal immigration.”
And that, it turns out, would be a huge problem for—of all people—Donald Trump. As a candidate and as president, Trump made achieving 4 percent GDP growth each year the centerpiece of his domestic agenda.
After the strong economic growth number of 4.1 percent for the second quarter of 2018, Trump told a gathering of business leaders that the next quarter “could be in the fives.” Not content to rest there, the president echoed his campaign pledge by proclaiming, “I really think we can go much higher than in the fives once we get trade deals that are rational, and sane, and good to our country.”
Sadly for Trump, the American economy did not hit his 5 percent growth targets in either the third or fourth quarters of 2018. Worse still, last August the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) painted a much gloomier picture for the future.
While America’s budget scorekeeper forecast annual, inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) will expand by 3.1 percent for this year, “in 2019, the pace of GDP growth slows to 2.4 percent in the agency’s forecast as growth in business investment and government purchases slows.” Worse still, as the top chart above reflects, “from 2023 to 2028, real GDP is projected to grow by about 1.7 percent each year.” And that’s a real problem for a president who promised to “to create 25 million new American jobs in the next decade and return to 4 percent annual economic growth.” After all, to hit those targets (see the second chart above), Donald Trump will have to oversee a massive jump in productivity or a huge expansion in the labor force. (CBO’s January 2019 forecast for 2019 to 2029 is little different.) And that means a lot more immigration, not less.
To fully appreciate the magnitude of Trump’s conundrum, a little historical context is in order: No American president since Lyndon Johnson averaged 4 percent GDP growth over his tenure in office.
Memo to Trump: The last president to average 4 percent economic growth was LBJ.
As for the GOP, no Republican president has averaged 4 percent economic growth in our lifetimes.
Here’s why: Economic growth, as Neil Irwin of the New York Times helpfully it up in September 2016, results from the growth of the labor force and the improvement of its productivity:
As a simple matter of arithmetic, G.D.P. boils down to how much people are working, and how much economic output is generated for each unit of work…The more workers you have, the more hours people will work and the more stuff you’ll make.
But G.D.P. growth isn’t just about demographics and work force trends. It also depends on how effective businesses are at converting human labor into economic output. In a word, productivity.
Unfortunately for the United States, neither the labor force nor American productivity is growing at the rates needed to routinely hit the 4 percent GDP level regularly achieved by the U.S. economy between 1950 and 1973. During that post-World War II boom, the American workforce grew by 1.6 percent while productivity gains (from new technology, process improvements, greater workforce skills and other innovations) averaged a staggering 2.4 percent per year. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warned during the 2016 election, CBO was forecasting only 1.9 percent GDP growth between 2016 and 2016, with the labor force anticipated to grow by only 0.5 percent each year over the ensuing decade.
To hit his 4 percent annual GDP growth target, Trump will have to mind the gap.
Now, the U.S. unemployment rate has continued to drop over the past two years. And among “prime-age” workers aged 25 to 54, the participation rate of 82 percent is already nearing the high water marked set in 2000. But the overall labor force participation rate of 62.9 percent has been basically flat since 2014. The Congressional Budget Office expects that level to remain steady through 2022.
The nonpartisan CBO doesn’t see the labor force participation rate increasing over the next decade.
Even with the growing demand for workers, the problem, CBO warns, is that “demographic pressures” will “continue to push down the rate’s long-run trend.” To put it another way, America is getting much older, very quickly.
As the Census Bureau reported in March, in 2016 America’s population of 323 million included 49.2 million people (or 15 percent) ages 65 and older. With the aging of the Baby Boomers, that percentage will jump to 17 percent by 2020 and 21 percent (or 73.1 million people) by 2030. By 2060, the United States is forecast to have over 400 million people; 94.7 million (23 percent) will be 65 and older.
America is getting old...fast.
Two years ago, Irwin estimated Trump would still be short 18 million workers of achieving his goal. With CBO forecasting annual productivity growth at 1.4 percent from 2018 to 2028 and yearly labor force growth only 0.5 percent, the president has only two options. As Irwin explained, neither will be very appealing to his base:
One option would be to encourage people to work until a much older age. Sorry, Grandpa, you may need to go back to work so President Trump can hit his employment target.
Another option is to substantially increase immigration levels above currently forecast levels. That is, of course, inconsistent with other dimensions of the Trump policy agenda. Indeed, if he follows through on plans to deport millions of immigrants working illegally, that would make hitting the job and G.D.P. growth goals that much harder.
Turning to Grandpa—and Grandma—doesn’t seem like much of an option at all, and not just because the overall labor force participation rate seems stuck just below 63 percent. As Vox documented, studies from the RAND Corporation, the International Monetary Fund, and other researchers have found that an aging labor pool holds back economic growth because “older workforces are less productive on a per-worker basis.” As for much less productive, RAND estimated that two-thirds of the GDP loss due to an aging work force could be attributed the older workers’ reduced productivity.
So, short of a not-yet-foreseen, magical transformation of American productivity, the United States will need more immigrant workers—millions of them—now and for the foreseeable future. Even as undocumented immigration across our southern border remains at a fraction of its high over a decade ago, in 2016 some 1.18 million people were granted permanent lawful residence in the United States. Again, note that legal immigration foes like Donald Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia want to reduce that number to only about 500,000 per year. And while Mexico remains the No. 1 source of these legal immigrants, China (2), India (3), the Philippines (4), and Vietnam (6) have fueled Asia’s replacement of Latin America as the largest region sending migrants to the United States. The result, the Census Bureau concluded in “Demographic Turning Points for the United States: Population Projections for 2020 to 2060”:
By 2028, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population is projected to be higher than any time since 1850.
America’s foreign-born population will soon hit its highest percentage since the 1890’s.
That still won’t be enough—not, that is, if Donald Trump expects to get anywhere near his goal of 4 percent annual economic growth. And America will need those extra immigrants, whether people like Laura Ingraham like those “massive demographic changes” or not.
And contrary to the unbearable whiteness of being Laura Ingraham, most Americans did vote for those changes, at least with their reproductive organs. As Vox recently reported:
The number of births in the US dropped by 2 percent between 2016 and 2017, to 60.2 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44, continuing a general downturn that started with the Great Recession of 2008. It’s the lowest the fertility rate has been in 30 years.
Whatever the combination of factors (such as the impact of the recession, lack of child support resources, greater availability of contraception, etc.) driving the fertility rate further below the replacement level of 2.1, in the future the United States will not be a whiter shade of pale. Already, as Ezra Klein documented last month, “the most common age for white Americans is 58, for Asians it’s 29, for African Americans it’s 27, and for Hispanics it’s 11.”
Sorry, Fox News: Minority births have passed those of whites.
In 2004, only four states saw the number of deaths of white residents exceed the number of births. By 2016, the number of states with declining white populations reached 26.
In more than half the states, white deaths now exceed white births.
As Klein explained in the “Browning of America,” the demographic changes in the United States are coming fast and furious:
The government predicts that in 2030, immigration will overtake new births as the dominant driver of population growth. About 15 years after that, America will phase into majority-minority status — for the first time in the nation’s history, non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up a majority of the population.
That cross will come in part because America’s black, Hispanic, Asian, and mixed-race populations are expected to grow — indeed, the Hispanic and Asian populations are expected to roughly double, and the mixed-race population to triple. Meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white population is, uniquely, expected to fall, dipping from 199 million in 2020 to 179 million in 2060. The Census Bureau minces no words here: “The only group projected to shrink is the non-Hispanic White population,” they report.
As both Klein and his critics agree, this is a recipe for incendiary politics in America for years to come. That Donald Trump and his backers won the last round in 2016 with “economic anxiety” as cover for racial resentment seems clear. But in a final irony, Trump voters will not only have to choose between immigrants they hate and the economic growth they claim to love. Forty-two percent of rural voters may say “immigrants are a burden on the country,” but their health and perhaps even their lives increasingly depend on those new arrivals.
Simply put, the American health care system in general—and in rural areas specifically—could not function without immigrants. Almost 28 percent (or 254,000) of the nation’s 910,000 doctors and surgeons are immigrants. Almost 24 percent (or 489,000) of America’s 2.1 million nurses and home health aides were born in another country. Foreign-trained physicians account for almost one-half of all doctors in some specialties, especially those like geriatrics, cardiology, and nephrology disproportionately focused on older patients.
The American health care system depends of immigrants, period.
And as the Trump administration began changes to U.S. visa policies as part of its Muslim travel ban in 2017, the impact quickly became clear in the areas where he enjoys the greatest support. From coal miners in Pennsylvania to oil field workers in North Dakota, the New York Times reported that March on how “rural areas brace for a doctor shortage due to visa policy.”
About 25 percent of all physicians practicing or training in the United States are foreign, but in some inner cities and most rural areas, that share is significantly higher.
Significantly higher, indeed. “In Great Falls, Mont.,” the Times explained, “60 percent of the doctors who specialize in hospital care at Benefis Health System, which serves about 230,000 people in 15 counties, are foreign doctors on work visas.”
It’s no wonder analysts like Howard Gleckman are asking questions every American should be thinking about. Questions like this:
There are not enough personal care aides to care for frail seniors. What will we do?
For most Americans, polling suggests that one answer will be to expand immigration to the United States. Roughly three-quarters believe that immigration is good for the country. Two-thirds support maintaining or increasing current immigration levels. In Gallup’s surveys, the percentage urging a reduction in legal immigration has dropped from 41 to 31 percent. A staggering 81 percent favor (47 percent) or strongly favor (34 percent) a path to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States. According to CBS News, Americans by 61 to 37 percent believe that a wall is not necessary to secure the border. (It is worth noting that Canada, with just one-ninth of America’s population of 330 million, will welcome 1 million new immigrants over just the next three years, nearly triple the U.S. rate.) President Trump would be on solid ground with a majority of the American people if he expanded legal immigration significantly (if not to “the largest numbers ever).
But his own voters are another matter. Donald Trump’s base isn’t just dead set against all of these measures, but rates immigration as a higher national priority than do Democrats and Independents. So, Donald Trump has a choice to make between the xenophobia he promised Republicans and the economic growth he pledged to achieve for everyone. All of which suggests State of the Union Trump will be short-lived. After all, even if a broken clock is right twice a day, it’s wrong the rest of the time.