{"id":431367,"date":"2026-01-25T01:42:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T01:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/431367\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T01:42:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T01:42:08","slug":"the-zero-sum-labour-market-trap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/431367\/","title":{"rendered":"The zero-sum labour market trap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free<\/p>\n

Your guide to what Trump\u2019s second term means for Washington, business and the world<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Good morning. President Donald Trump\u2019s immigration crackdown likely pushed net migration to the US into negative territory in 2025 \u2014 for the first time in more than 50 years \u2014 with the trend expected to continue this year. This has seismic implications for the labour market, which has decelerated significantly.<\/p>\n

While Trump argues immigrants have stolen jobs from American workers, labour market data says otherwise. The seasonally adjusted labour market data from Jed Kolko of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (who interpolated for October\u2019s forever-missing data using the adjacent months) shows a glaring divergence: the native-born unemployment rate worsened last year, while the rate for foreign-born workers held steady.<\/p>\n

This is not very surprising considering that \u201cnative- and foreign-born workers are more likely to be complements than substitutes for each other\u201d, Kolko said. As he noted, if a company cannot hire foreign-born workers, it may scale back operations entirely, reducing the need for the native-born staff who would have worked alongside them.<\/p>\n

So far, the broader US economy hasn\u2019t had a big pullback in economic activity. But a shrinking workforce and a falling break-even employment growth rate mean the labour market is tighter than what headline numbers suggest. Adam Posen, also of the Peterson Institute, and Peter Orszag of Lazard have argued this would lead to higher services inflation. In services sectors dependent on migrant labour, such as home healthcare costs, prices are rising, which is bound to intensify once deportation measures take full effect. There are no winners here. We are all becoming worse off. Let us know what you think: unhedged@ft.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Good reads from Unhedged: <\/p>\n

Hakyung: Spheres of influence<\/a><\/p>\n

Katie: \u201cHe just does not shut up\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Rob: Hard lines<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free Your guide to what Trump\u2019s second term means for Washington,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":431368,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-431367","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-economy"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/431368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}