What Biden’s immigration order means for the job market

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Jun 04, 2024 View in browser
 
POLITICO Morning Money

By Sam Sutton

Presented by Citi

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QUICK FIX

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.”

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Driving the Day

The Labor Department releases April job openings data at 10 a.m. … The CFTC’s Global Markets Advisory Committee meets in New York at 10 a.m. … Treasury assistant secretary Brent Neiman discusses the economic front in Ukraine at the Atlantic Council at 1 p.m. … Treasury’s Federal Advisory Committee on Insurance meets at 1 p.m. … Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen testifies at Senate Appropriations at 2:30 p.m. … The Joint Economic Committee holds a hearing on artificial intelligence at 2:30 p.m.

 

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The Economy

The weakness is strong — Treasuries rose on weak manufacturing data that bolstered the case for a Federal Reserve rate cut later this year, Bloomberg reports.

— Still, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari told The FT that rate cuts should remain on hold for an “extended” time.

The long tail of housing costs An overwhelming share of Gen Z voters will be thinking about housing affordability when they head to the polls this November, Katy O’Donnell reports. A new survey from Redfin found that “housing affordability matters a lot more for younger people than it does for older voters,” Redfin chief economist Daryl Fairweather said.

 

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Wall Street

The 2024 Trades Investors are likely to scale back their appetite for risky investments as the election approaches, according to a new Morgan Stanley report written up by Bloomberg. “As first-mover investors reduce popular risk exposures, macro markets could move in ways that encourage a broader swath of investors to join suit,” strategists Matthew Hornbach and James Lord wrote.

— Investors see stock market gains and higher inflation if Trump wins, according to Reuters.

The Meme-pire Strikes Back — Keith Gill, also known as “Roaring Kitty,” posted a screenshot showing a large position in GameStop, powering a major rally in the meme stock. Now E*Trade is weighing booting Gill from its platform amid fears of stock manipulation, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Sam Altman business — Many of the startups backed by OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman are partnering with the artificial intelligence juggernaut, The Wall Street Journal reports. The arrangements raise questions about potential conflicts of interest.

New funding source — The Community Development Bankers Association and National Bankers Association launched a new program to channel institutional deposits into smaller banks in underserved communities and minority depository institutions. The Advancing Communities Together Deposit program is being seeded with $35 million from Blackstone Group, BNY Mellon, Warburg Pincus and IntraFi.

Resolved — Technical glitches at the New York Stock Exchange temporarily halted trades of big-name stocks like stocks including Berkshire Hathaway and Chipotle on Monday, Declan Harty reports.

 

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Regulatory Corner

The CFPB’s naughty listThe consumer watchdog is setting up a registry for nonbanks found to have violated the law, Katy reports.

Bitcoin bust — Bitcoin investor and MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor will pay $40 million to settle tax fraud charges brought by the Washington, D.C., attorney general’s office, Declan Harty reports.

A message from Citi:

The world of cross-border payments is at an inflection point. Amid technological advancements, shifting client demands, and an unprecedented rates environment, the global payments ecosystem is rapidly transforming.

Payments are moving away from traditional instruction methods, which are tied to batch and files, and moving toward application programming interface (API) connectivity. The evolving landscape is also driven by changing behaviors and heightened expectations, with consumers seeking a streamlined, transparent, 24x7 real-time experience, both domestically and across borders.

Best-in-class client experiences leveraging new technologies can address key pain points and have the potential to transform cross-border payments for the benefit of all.

Access in-depth analysis from Citi on what the future landscape might look like in the Citi GPS Report, Future of Cross-Border Payments.

 
 

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