ALL JOE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

Yet one unexplored reason behind the tight labor market is another type of shortage: immigration flows. The United States has been admitting fewer immigrants in recent years due to policy restrictions put in place because of the pandemic. But the slowdown began earlier, with the relentless war on immigration set in motion by the Trump administration.

Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at the University of California at Davis, whose work focuses on the intersection of labor economics and immigration, recently calculated that the US economy is missing 2 million working-age immigrants.

"The net inflow of immigrants into the United States has essentially halted for almost 2 years," he wrote last month. Peri told me he started to see the downward trend since before the pandemic, "the effect of some [immigration policy] restrictions. And then, in the beginning of 2020, you start seeing a pandemic travel ban. For two years COVID-19 has been a huge cause of this."

Peri said that roughly 1 million of the 2 million lost immigrants would have been college educated. "Some of them are scientists who used to come in large numbers. And now those doors have been closed by the pandemic," Peri said. "Not only are we not finding people to walk the dogs, we're also not having [immigrants] in the labs, in the clinics, in the engineering centers that push technology forward. We have fewer of them, and that's a potentially massive effect for economic productivity in the longer run."

The industries that rely on immigrant workers have higher rates of unfulfilled jobs. "Sectors like food or hospitality have massive shortages, in the order of 15 to 20 percent of jobs not filled relative to the total," Peri said.

It's hard to quantify how many of those 2 million immigrants didn't come due to the pandemic restrictions and how many didn't due to the policy decisions from the Trump era. But perhaps the main legacy of the former president is how he dramatically altered America's immigration system: Trump signed more than 400 immigration-related executive actions.

Yet President Biden hasn't exactly rushed to open the doors to let more immigrants come in. 

Tweet   @brothersjudd