Immigrant labor vital to economy
MIAMI — Having fled economic and political chaos in Venezuela, Luisana Silva now loads carpets for a South Carolina rug company. She earns enough to pay rent, buy groceries, gas up her car — and send money home to her parents.
Reaching the United States was a harrowing ordeal. Silva, 25, her husband and their then-7year-old daughter braved the treacherous jungles of Panama’s Darien Gap, traveled the length of Mexico, crossed the Rio Grande and then turned themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol in Brownsville, Texas. Seeking asylum, they received a work permit last year and found jobs in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
“My plan is to help my family and to grow economically here,” Silva said.
Her story amounts to far more than one family’s arduous quest for a better life. The millions of jobs that Silva and other new immigrant arrivals have been filling in the United States appear to solve a
riddle that has confounded economists for at least a year:
How has the economy managed to prosper, adding hundreds of thousands of jobs, month after month, at a time when the Federal Reserve has aggressively raised interest rates to fight inflation — normally a recipe for a recession?
Increasingly, the answer appears to be immigrants — whether living in the United States legally or not. The influx of foreign-born adults vastly
raised the supply of available workers after a U.S. labor shortage had left many companies unable to fill jobs.
More workers filling more jobs and spending more money has helped drive economic growth and create still-more job openings. The availability of immigrant workers eased the pressure on companies to sharply raise wages and to then pass on their higher labor costs to their customers via higher prices that feed inflation. Though U.S. inflation
remains elevated, it has plummeted from its levels of two years ago.
“There’s been something of a mystery — how are we continuing to get such extraordinary strong job growth with inflation still continuing to come down?’’ said Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute and a former chief economist at the Labor Department. “The immigration numbers being higher than what we had thought — that really does pretty much solve that puzzle.’’