MAGA DON'T WORK:

 Beginning with the restrictionist presidency of Donald Trump in 2017, and then supercharging through the effective 2020-21 border-closure triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. took in about 1.7 million fewer working-age immigrants than would have come at the prior intake rate, according to a recent analysis by Giovanni Peri, economics professor at University of California at Davis.

Meanwhile, absent those immigrants the domestic economy experienced a post-vaccine hiring explosion, with the unemployment rate--which measures the percentage of people actively looking for but failing to find a job--hitting 50-year lows. Inflation-adjusted average wage growth also jumped for a while there, increasing by at least 4 percent annualized for 12 consecutive months.

This should have been the moment when the startlingly high number of prime-aged Americans classified as Not in the Labor Force ("NILFs," no really) got off the sidelines and back into the job market.

And yet: "That did not increase work rates or labor force participation of Americans who are already here," says American Enterprise Institute economist Nicholas Eberstadt, author of the freshly revised (with post-pandemic intro) 2016 book Men Without Work. "We've now got this incredible peacetime labor shortage, and we also have a drop in the number of people in the workforce, by at least a ballpark of 3 million lower than we would have expected on trend before COVID. And that's leaving out immigration, so it's actually lower."

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