Native-born US workforce totals dipped — as immigrant labor figures rose: report

The American labor force is becoming less American.

Newly-released data from the Center for Immigration Studies is sounding the alarm on the declining US labor force, by showing fewer native-born Americans are joining the workforce — with men representing the largest decline seen in decades.

“The share of working-age (16 to 64) U.S.-born men not in the labor force increased from 11 percent in April 1960 to 17 percent in April 2000, and to 22 percent in April 2024,” the analysis found.

“Among ‘prime-age’ U.S.-born men (25 to 54), the group most likely to work, the share not in the labor force was 4 percent in April 1960, 9 percent in 2000 and 12 percent in 2024.”

The study concluded 43 million men and women — born in the US and aged 16 to 64 — were not working as of last April, which is 8.5 million more than in 2000.

And those numbers didn’t include “the 9.7 million immigrants not in the labor force” or “5.8 million unemployed immigrants and U.S.-born.”

The pool of untapped labor in the US is massive, “challenging the argument that a shortage of workers necessitates reliance on illegal immigration,” the study noted.

The number of working age US-born men not in the labor force increased by 13.2 million from 1960 to 2024, the study also found.

Meanwhile, the number of working-age immigrant men participating in the workforce jumped by 14.1 million during that same period.

“Focusing only on U.S.-born men without a bachelor’s degree and excluding teenagers still shows the share (20 to 64) not in the labor force increased from 7 percent in 1960 to 16 percent in 2000, and to 22 percent in 2024,” the study found.

The states that experienced the largest increases in working-age men out of the workforce were Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, Alaska, Florida, New Jersey, Mississippi, North Carolina and California.

The study also noted that fewer women have joined the workforce since 2000, a trend that briefly reversed following the pandemic.