Immigrants help sustain job growth as inflation cools, economists say

While the G.O.P. insists in a rhetoric of the border crisis as a pressing "invasion" that endangers jobs for the native population, economists insist that, on the contrary, immigrants - both undocumented and legal - have helped keep the U.S. labor market on a steady roll in recent months without causing inflation.

That's what several analysts told NBC News for a recent article after Goldman Sachs told clients in May that the current dynamic of a booming job market - the U.S. economy added 272,000 jobs last month, according to a blockbuster report - and cooling inflation - prices were flat in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics - is partly the effect of increased immigration.

Of course, this won't necessarily translate into campaign speeches or a favorable outcome for President Joe Biden in the November election, as most Americans have a negative perception of the current state of the economy.

Over half of U.S. citizens (56%) believe the country is facing a recession even though that is not actually the case, according to a recent survey. The study also found that the majority of respondents (58%) believe the economy is worsening because of mismanagement by the Biden administration.

Goldman Sachs analysis said, "Recent immigrants have flowed disproportionately into the parts of the labor force that were particularly tight in 2022, contributing to labor supply in places where it was most badly needed," as cited in an article by NBC News.

"We've seen labor force supply come up quite a bit, through immigration, through recovering participation," Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said last week at the central bank's press conference following its widely expected decision to keep interest rates flat.

Moody's Chief Economist Mark Zandi agreed with this opinion. "The immigration surge poses lots of challenges to communities across the country, but it came at a very fortuitous time to help ease the labor market pressure, when the Fed was working hard to do it by interest rate hikes," he told CNBC.

Zandi also credited immigration with helping the United States maintain a positive GDP. "It has reduced the need for more rate hikes, and probably has been critical to ensuring that the economy has avoided a recession," he said.

Biden's recent executive order to tighten restrictions on asylum seekers at the southern border could threaten the continuity of this immigrant-powered economic boom, while it also remains to be seen the future of the White House administration after November.

Trump has promised that if he is re-elected, he will carry out a mass deportation of the 15 to 20 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States.