Science proves that the U.S. needs immigrant workers; U.S. companies say that they don’t need more workers

by philg

It’s Veterans Day. Historically, one of the things that U.S. society tried to do was ensure that good jobs were available for those who left the military and returned to civilian life. This was a matter of great concern around the end of World War II. See for example “JOBS FOR VETERANS REPORTED FEWER; Full Impact of Discharges Is Yet to Come, Says Commerce Bureau” (New York Times, December 20, 1945):

Veterans are beginning to encounter difficulties in finding employment, with the full impact of discharges upon the labor market yet to be felt, the Department of Commerce said today in this month’s issue of its Survey of Current Business.

With Army surveys showing that at least 75 per cent of the returning veterans would be job-seekers, the article concluded that the country faced a “primary problem” of developing a labor demand sufficient to provide employment for the returning veterans,” along with the additional problem of “finding jobs satisfactory to the veteran with previous training, newly acquired skills and generally high expectations.”

Ever since we opened our borders in 1965 we’ve forced veterans to compete with an ever-larger group of immigrant workers. We’re informed that it is a Scientific fact that an open border enriches every American, including veterans, because immigrant workers are critical to the U.S. economy and there are more than enough jobs to go around. For this post let’s ignore that our immigration policy doesn’t select for immigrants who are able to work; someone who is 2 years old or 85 years old or disabled or completely unskilled has the same entitlement to lifetime residence/citizenship under our asylum-based system or under our family relation-based system as someone who is of working age. Let’s assume that, in fact, immigration does bring in mostly people who are capable of working and who want to work (an irrational desire in a cradle-to-grave welfare state!). Does the assumption that there are ample jobs both for new veterans and new immigrants still make sense?

“More Big Companies Bet They Can Still Grow Without Hiring” (Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2025):

American employers are increasingly making the calculation that they can keep the size of their teams flat—or shrink them through layoffs—without harming their businesses. Part of that thinking is the belief that artificial intelligence will be used to pick up some of the slack and automate more processes. … “If people are getting more productive, you don’t need to hire more people,” Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive, said in an interview. “I see a lot of companies pre-emptively holding the line, forecasting and hoping that they can have smaller workforces.”

Many companies seem intent on embracing a new, ultralean model of staffing, one where more roles are kept unfilled and hiring is treated as a last resort. At Intuit, every time a job comes open, managers are pushed to justify why they need to backfill it, said Sandeep Aujla, the company’s chief financial officer. The new rigor around hiring helps combat corporate bloat.

“Amazon Plans to Replace More Than Half a Million Jobs With Robots” (New York Times, October 21, 2025):

Over the past two decades, no company has done more to shape the American workplace than Amazon. In its ascent to become the nation’s second-largest employer, it has hired hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers, built an army of contract drivers and pioneered using technology to hire, monitor and manage employees.

Now, interviews and a cache of internal strategy documents viewed by The New York Times reveal that Amazon executives believe the company is on the cusp of its next big workplace shift: replacing more than half a million jobs with robots.

Amazon’s U.S. work force has more than tripled since 2018 to almost 1.2 million. But Amazon’s automation team expects the company can avoid hiring more than 160,000 people in the United States it would otherwise need by 2027. That would save about 30 cents on each item that Amazon picks, packs and delivers to customers.

Executives told Amazon’s board last year that they hoped robotic automation would allow the company to continue to avoid adding to its U.S. work force in the coming years, even though they expect to sell twice as many products by 2033. That would translate to more than 600,000 people whom Amazon didn’t need to hire.

“Amazon to Lay Off Tens of Thousands of Corporate Workers” (WSJ, October 27, 2025):

The latest round of job cuts would be the largest since 2022, when Amazon eliminated around 27,000 roles. That layoff occurred in waves.

The company views the cuts in part as an effort to correct an aggressive hiring period during the pandemic, the people said. During that period, a boom in online shopping led Amazon to double its warehouse network over a two-year period.

Amazon CEO Jassy has sought to find ways for the company to do more with less. In June Jassy sent a note to employees that said increasing use of artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for certain jobs. He called generative AI a once-in-a-lifetime technological change that is already altering how Amazon deals with consumers and other businesses and how it conducts its own operations, including job cuts.

“​​As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” he said at the time. “It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.”

Veterans are above-average in health, intelligence, and education and they come from richer-than-average families. Nonetheless, I wonder if the combination of AI and a continued inrush of legal immigrants (somewhere between 1.2 and 2.6 million annually, according to ChatGPT) will make it almost impossible for tomorrow’s veterans to get decent jobs.

Related: The Bobs.

21 thoughts on “Science proves that the U.S. needs immigrant workers; U.S. companies say that they don’t need more workers”

  1. Many veterans are immigrants.

    ChatGPT:

    “As of 2022, about 731,000 U.S. veterans were born outside the United States — that is approximately 4.5% of the total veteran population (16.2 million) in that year.”

    • @anon

      It’s interesting to ask ShatGPT a related question. “What percentage of foreign born people living in the United States are U.S. military veterans?” returns:

      “There are roughly 600,000–700,000 foreign‑born veterans and about 51–53 million foreign‑born residents in recent estimates, so foreign‑born veterans make up about 0.9%–1.4% of the foreign‑born population.”

      Why not 100%? One idea would be to make military service (or other community service in the case of legitimate DQs) mandatory for naturalization of U.S. citizens. Create an American Foreign Legion and make the rest go through an enlistment in that before U.S. residence. Want to live in a free country? Learn how that freedom was won firsthand.

      Pipe dreams aside, thanks for your service, veterans!

  2. How big companies, especially Amazon, will keep their profit margins if their customer base, which gets poorer due to the layoffs and hiring freezes, is getting poorer? Compete with Temu in China, where the jobs are?
    See Milton Friedman on market action time delay, small businesses’ profit margins are falling already. Tide affects all boats.

  3. Trying not to think about how all the new houses built in the last 25 years were bought by people who came from abroad while the lion kingdom rented the same tiny apartment for the entire time.

  4. The Trump admin says 2m immigrants have self-deported since the start of his administration.

    This likely means a huge number of openings in construction, mowing laws, washing cars, washing dishes, picking fruit, etc.

    Philip — Has this generated the boom in job openings you’re looking for?

    Combined with tariffs, you kids will soon be able to get jobs building iphones, working as banana farmers, etc.

    • David, can you please forward me the job openings for banana farming? I previously had a couple great jobs that afforded me a lot of free time to enjoy the company of my dead brother’s wife and smoke a bit of crack now and then, but for some reason I lost them.

    • David, hooray! My lucky day is on the way. Some folks say that smart people make there own luck, and my dad said I’m the smartest guy in the world.

    • David, since when price of bananas increased by 8%? Think that Dem Congress lady lies a lot. Just bought bananas at 53 cents per pound, 8 decent bananas. Asked my wife and she said that 2 years ago price was 49 cents per pound. This is 8% in 2 years, most of them before Trump presidency. Guess this Dem congress lady stopped going to walmart since her election bananza.
      My wife also said that 30 years ago bananas were 19 cents per pound. Audacious Trump was inflating bananas pricing almost by factor of 3 for the past 30 year it seems. Good that my compensation grew by factor of 4 and I can afford more bananas then 30 years ago.

    • perplexed — Walmart has a profit margin of around 3%.

      If they need to pay a new 10% tariff on bananas, they’re passing that along.

      https://www.npr.org/2025/08/21/nx-s1-5509592/walmart-tariff-costs-rising-earnings

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV3AnE-cAXU

      Trump tried to intimidate them into eating the tariffs, but maybe that didn’t work.

      Trump first tried to tell us the other countries would pay the tariffs, then he tried to have the companies absorb the tariffs, but of course they end up on the consumer. There’s no hiding $200B in new taxes.

    • David, at least Trump has what to show for it – tariff revenues. What do other successive US governments have to show for banana price increase 3 times? Also microtrends says that inflation – adjusted bananas are cheaper, and gives way to high average prices that I have not seen in real supermarkets, neither now nor 30 years ago. So I am not referencing that BS here.
      I am sure if Trump manages give even part of $2000 per capital revenue tariff bonus it low and middle – income people, this will for sure cover banana price increase.

    • David, but you said these bananas are now the “greatest” ever. Who wouldn’t want to pay more for these, right? I love a great banana. I’m sure even that hottie Maddy on the video loves a great banana too, no?

    • David: I think I wrote about this in a previous post. We’re told that immigrants hugely boost the U.S. economy. Yet millions of immigrants have left the U.S., either via ICE thuggery or self-deportation. Unless we were previously lied to, the U.S. economy should have shrunk dramatically. Yet instead we’re told that the U.S. GDP continues to grow. According to the St. Louis Fed, the number of job openings is roughly steady: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL

      So either the migrants who left weren’t working or the jobs that they were doing weren’t important?

      Separately, as a progressive I am a huge fan of tariffs, which work as a consumption tax (European style) and a carbon tax (also European style). In order to save our beloved planet, Americans should stop filling their houses with plastic Asian products. Tariffs discourage destructive behavior.

    • @philg
      > Americans should stop filling their houses with plastic Asian products
      I went to Wal*Mart to buy a leaf rake (illegal aliens use gas leaf blowers, I’m progressive). They didn’t have even one in the entire store. The home and garden section had all useful implements and tools removed, replaced with tacky Christmas junk, presumably made in China. Not sure how much the current tariffs did to stop the synthetic polymer flow for celebrating the birth of the baby Santa.

      @HB

      > also, that Maddy girl on the video is a real hottie, no? Ouch.
      Nah, she looks like Melinda Gates–yuck, gag me with a spoon. Trump picks cuties:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoline_Leavitt

      even AG Bondi ain’t bad for a granny.

  5. @perplexed: I’m really suffering! I like to put p-nut butter on my costly bananas. P-nut butter is up more than 50% over the past twenty years! It’s a double whammy!

    • DP, I feel for you but peanut butter is not for people with my metabolism. However, 50% in 20 years is definitely on par or maybe lower then real inflation rate.

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