… In 2015 and 2016, the United States saw a net international migration gain of more than 1 million people. It dipped to about 930,000 in 2017 and dropped to just over 700,000 in 2018. By 2020, the year of the pandemic’s arrival, it was under 500,000. And last year, the figure dropped to about 247,000.
That’s a massive and sudden decline that, among other things, subtracted a lot of potential workers from the U.S. economy and it was bound to have ripple effects. Some of those impacts were masked by the disruptions of the pandemic, when businesses were shuttered and unemployment rates spiked.
But one of the primary hallmarks of the rebooting U.S. economy has been a worker shortage, a plethora of “help wanted” signs in the windows of retailers, restaurants and other businesses in communities across the country. CONTINUED
Dante Chinni, NBC News
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