The Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Henry Olsen believes that part of the explanation for our recent labor shortage is that, thanks to the pandemic, many families got a taste of the one-earner family lifestyle, liked it, and are opting out of returning to two-earner family status as the economy improves.
“Last year’s enforced idleness and economic slowdown surely pushed many families into a one-earner status — even if unwillingly,” Olsen wrote. “It’s not unreasonable to assume that some liked the subsequent work-life balance. Rather than struggle to care for children and satisfy bosses, not to mention carve out time for one another, some couples surely found that they could make do with one wage and have a better quality of life.”
Olsen seems to think this is a positive development, and he’s right.
But then Olsen takes a hard left and suddenly uses this development as an argument for massively increasing immigration. By Olsen’s math, the labor force participation rate has fallen from 63.4% pre-pandemic to 61.6% today, a 1.8-point drop representing about 5 million lost workers.
Olsen acknowledges that employers are having to raise wages to entice nonworkers into the labor force. But then, out of nowhere, he asserts that if employers have to raise wages, more families will be able to afford the one-earner model. Wage increases, Olsen seems to believe, won’t be enough to increase the labor force, so a massive increase in immigration is needed.
“If Americans in families want to return partially to the pre-modern family structure, only a significant uptick in annual immigration numbers can meet employers’ demands,” Olsen wrote.
This is simply false. The economy does not need a massive infusion of cheap immigrant labor to support one-earner households. If anything, a massive increase in immigration would send wages back down, undermining both family formation and the wage gains that are helping make one-earner households possible again.
What Olsen leaves out of his story is the steady decline in male labor-force participation from its post-World War II high of 87% in 1949 to just 67.6% today. The missing men are not distributed equally across the workforce, either. It is those men with the lowest skill set and lowest wages that have been most likely to exit the labor force. And it is these same low-skilled men who are having the most trouble finding a wife to start a family with.
To make up for the 5 million workers lost during the pandemic, we would only need to return to a male labor force participation rate of 71.5% — in other words, the same male labor force participation rate we had as recently as 2009.
Importing massive numbers of low-skilled immigrants will only undermine the wage growth needed to entice low-skilled American men back into the workforce. It is the absolute wrong direction to take.
If we want to support families and make them easier to form, we should be doing everything possible to raise the wages of low-skilled American workers, not driving them back down by increasing the supply of cheap labor.
