The Effect of COVID-19 Immigration Restrictions on Post-Pandemic Labor Market Tightness

Maggie Isaacson, Cassandra Marks, Lowell Ricketts and Hannah Rubinton

Review, 2024

Abstract: During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were unprecedented shortfalls in immigration. Concurrently, as the economy recovered, the labor market became tight, with the number of vacancies per unemployed worker reaching two, more than twice its pre-pandemic average. In this article, we investigate whether these two trends are connected. We find no evidence to support the hypothesis that the immigration shortfalls caused the tight labor market, for two main reasons. First, while the immigration deficit peaked at about two million workers, this number had largely recovered by February 2022, just as labor market tightness was increasing. Second, we do not find that states, cities, or industries most impacted by immigration restrictions also experienced larger increases in labor market tightness.

Keywords: COVID-19; immigration; labor markets; labor market tightness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J20 J40 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/review/202 ... bor-market-tightness Abstract page (text/html)
https://www.stlouisfed.org/-/media/project/frbstl/ ... market-tightness.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedlrv:99203

DOI: 10.20955/r.2024.11

Access Statistics for this article

Review is currently edited by Juan M. Sanchez

More articles in Review from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Scott St. Louis ().