CBO on Migrant Workers

by Bruce Krasting
02/26/2011 10:00 -0500

I came across this slide from the Census Bureau.

According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, projected to 02/27/11 at 01:49 UTC (EST+5) is
310,895,999
COMPONENT SETTINGS FOR FEBRUARY 2011

One birth every.................................. 7 seconds
One death every.................................. 11 seconds
One international migrant (net) every............ 40 seconds
Net gain of one person every..................... 14 seconds


When you do the calculations on births/deaths/migrant workers you get the following results:

Annual births: 4.5mm
Annual deaths:2.9mm
Net change: 1.6mm
Net new migrant workers 790,000

From this one gets the total increase in population at ~2.6mm. Fully one-third of that growth comes from foreign immigrant workers. I was surprised to see how big the migrant worker side of the equation was. That comes to 66,000 a month. If you follow the monthly Non-Farms Payroll report you know that there have been many months that we don’t create that many net new jobs.

Our friends at the Congressional Budget Office just happened to have issued a report on this subject on Friday. Catchy title:



A slide that I thought was interesting shows just how much money is leaving the country from those foreign migrant workers:



The total came to $66 billion in 2009. That is a very big number. Of the $31b that left the shores to go south of the border $20b ended up in Mexico. Asia was the beneficiary of $17b of inward money flows. Of that, $3.2b went to China. China manages to suck the blood out of the USA every which way. We send them our money for interest on our debt. We send them money for everything we buy from them. And those who come to work here send back a few billion more.

Allow me to “playâ€