President Joe Biden’s incoming executive order restricting migrants’ ability to seek asylum at the border could spell trouble for the labor force. Standard Chartered estimates that nearly half the growth in non-farm payrolls reported by the Labor Department since October can be attributed to immigrant groups that include refugees, those seeking asylum and parolees, the bank’s Head of Global G10 FX Research and North America Macro Strategy Steve Englander and economist Dan Pan wrote in a research note. All told, those workers added 109,000 jobs per month. The average net monthly increase during that period was about 231,000. “For us, that was very striking,” Englander told MM. That raises the political stakes of Biden’s executive order, which would shut down asylum processes when crossings swell beyond 2,500 per day, according to the Associated Press. The asylum framework is reportedly similar to bipartisan border legislation that Republicans killed earlier this year at the urging of former President Donald Trump. While the processing of refugees and parolees would continue, access to asylum would be constrained. The southern border has been a political headache for the White House for more than two years. While Biden faces considerable pressure to address the flow of migrants, the strength of the labor market has been central to the president’s reelection pitch. In survey after survey, voters have ranked the economy as their top issue in the 2024 campaign. And, as Bloomberg reported on Monday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the economic impact of the immigration surge had a hand in keeping the U.S. economy afloat in recent years. If Standard Chartered’s estimates are correct, attempts to clamp down on the border would contribute to a softening of non-farm payrolls over the next year. Excluding those workers would have pushed monthly payrolls down to around 125,000 a month. While that isn’t recessionary, that figure would mean it’s “hardly boom time,” Englander and Pan wrote. (The labor market effects of Trump’s own immigration plan, which involves calling in the National Guard to forcibly deport what he estimates are between 15 million and 20 million undocumented immigrants, would prove much more substantial.) The bank derived its estimate from the number of temporary employment permits issued by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during that period. That includes those granted to migrants seeking parolees, refugees and asylum seekers who sometimes wait years before attaining permanent status. Still, the bank’s “cautious” approach to estimating employment rates among the relevant immigrant populations means it could be a low estimate, Englander added. The exact figure is impossible to discern from the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report, which was not designed to track the legal status of workers. The May report will be released on Friday morning. Many immigrants “cross the border for economic reasons. They're motivated to find jobs. And so their employment rate could be higher. In which case, their contribution to [non-farm payrolls] could be higher,” Englander said. “If the border were shut down today, would [non-farm payrolls] be lower a year from now? The answer is very likely yes.” IT’S TUESDAY — Hat’s off to my colleague Zach Warmbrodt, who crushed it at Morning Money for the last year and a half. Thankfully, he’s still at POLITICO. Send tips and suggestions to me at ssutton@politico.com.
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