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Immigrants in Maine Are Filling a Labor Gap. It May Be a Prelude for the U.S.

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Maine has a lot of lobsters. It also has a lot of older people, ones who are less and less willing and able to catch, clean and sell the crustaceans that make up a $1 billion industry for the state. Companies are turning to foreign-born workers to bridge the divide.

“Folks born in Maine are generally not looking for manufacturing work, especially in food manufacturing,” said Ben Conniff, a founder of Luke’s Lobster, explaining that the firm’s lobster processing plant has been staffed mostly by immigrants since it opened in 2013, and that foreign-born workers help keep “the natural resources economy going.”

Maine has the oldest population of any U.S. state, with a median age of 45.1. As America overall ages, the state offers a preview of what that could look like economically — and the critical role that immigrants are likely to play in filling the labor market holes that will be created as native-born workers retire.

Nationally, immigration is expected to become an increasingly critical source of new workers and economic vibrancy in the coming decades.

It’s a silver lining at a time when huge immigrant flows that started in 2022 are straining state and local resources across the country and drawing political backlash. While the influx may pose near-term challenges, it is also boosting the American economy’s potential. Employers today are managing to hire rapidly partly because of the incoming labor supply. The Congressional Budget Office has already revised up both its population and its economic growth projections for the next decade in light of the wave of newcomers.

In Maine, companies are already beginning to look to immigrants to fill labor force gaps on factory floors and in skilled trades alike as native-born employees either leave the work force or barrel toward retirement.

State legislators are working to create an Office of New Americans, an effort to attract and integrate immigrants into the work force, for instance. Private companies are also focused on the issue. The Luke’s Lobster founders started an initiative called Lift All Boats in 2022 to supplement and diversify the fast-aging lobster fishing industry. It aims to teach minorities and other industry outsiders how to lobster and how to work their way through the extensive and complex licensing process, and about half of the participants have been foreign-born.

They included Chadai Gatembo, 18, who came to Maine two years ago from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mr. Gatembo trekked into the United States from Central America, spent two weeks in a Texas detention center and then followed others who were originally from Congo to Maine. He lived in a youth shelter for a time, but now resides with foster parents, has learned English, has been approved for work authorization and is about to graduate from high school.

Mr. Gatembo would like to go to college, but he also enjoyed learning to lobster last summer. He is planning to do it again this year, entertaining the possibility of one day becoming a full-fledged lobsterman.

“Every immigrant, people from different countries, moved here looking for opportunities,” Mr. Gatembo said. “I have a lot of interests — lobster is one of them.”

A smaller share of Maine’s population is foreign-born than in the country as a whole, but the state is seeing a jump in immigration as refugees and other new entrants pour in.

That echoes a trend playing out nationally. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the United States added 3.3 million immigrants last year and will add another 3.3 million in 2024, up sharply from the 900,000 that was typical in the years leading up to the pandemic.

One-third to half of last year’s wave of immigrants came in through legal channels, with work visas or green cards, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis. But a jump in unauthorized immigrants entering the country has also been behind the surge, the economists estimate.

Many recent immigrants have concentrated in certain cities, often to be near other immigrants or in some cases because they were bused there by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, after crossing the border. Miami, Denver, Chicago and New York have all been big recipients of newcomers.

In that sense, today’s immigration is not economically ideal. As they resettle in clusters, migrants are not necessarily ending up in the places that most need their labor. And the fact that many are not authorized to work can make it harder for them to fit seamlessly into the labor market.

Adriana Hernandez, 24, a mother of four from Caracas, Venezuela, is living with her family in a one-bedroom apartment in Aurora, Colo. After journeying through the Darién Gap and crossing the border in December, Ms. Hernandez and her family turned themselves in to immigration authorities in Texas and then traveled by bus to Colorado.

They have no work authorization as they wait for a judge to rule on their case, so Ms. Hernandez’s husband has turned to day labor to keep them housed and fed.

“Economically, I’m doing really badly, because we haven’t had the chance to get a work permit,” Ms. Hernandez said in Spanish.

It’s a common issue in the Denver area, where shelters were housing nearly 5,000 people at the peak early this year, said Jon Ewing, a spokesman with Denver Human Services. The city has helped about 1,600 people apply for work authorization, almost all successfully, as it tries to get immigrants on their feet so they do not overwhelm the local shelter options.

Most people who gain authorization are finding work fairly easily, Mr. Ewing said, with employers like carpenters and chefs eager for the influx of new workers.

Nationally, even with the barriers that prevent some immigrants from being hired, the huge recent inflow has been helping to bolster job growth and speed up the economy.

“I’m very confident that we would not have seen the employment gains we saw last year — and we certainly can’t sustain it — without immigration,” said Wendy Edelberg, the director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy research group at the Brookings Institution.

The new supply of immigrants has allowed employers to hire at a rapid pace without overheating the labor market. And with more people earning and spending money, the economy has been insulated against the slowdown and even recession that many economists once saw as all but inevitable as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022 and 2023.

Ernie Tedeschi, a research scholar at Yale Law School, estimates that the labor force would have decreased by about 1.2 million people without immigration from 2019 to the end of 2023 because of population aging, but that immigration has instead allowed it to grow by two million.

Economists think the immigration wave could also improve America’s labor force demographics in the longer run even as the native-born population ages, with a greater share of the population in retirement with each year.

The nation’s aging could eventually lead to labor shortages in some industries — like the ones that have already started to surface in some of Maine’s business sectors — and it will mean that a smaller base of workers is paying taxes to support federal programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Immigrants tend to be younger than the native-born population, and are more likely to work and have higher fertility. That means that they can help to bolster the working-age population. Previous waves of immigration have already helped to keep the United States’ median age lower and its population growing more quickly than it otherwise would.

“Even influxes that were difficult and overwhelming at first, there were advantages on the other side of that,” Mr. Tedeschi said.

In fact, immigration is poised to become increasingly critical to America’s demographics. By 2042, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, all American population growth will be due to immigration, as deaths cancel out births among native-born people. And largely because immigration has picked up so much, the C.B.O. thinks that the U.S. adult population will be 7.4 million people larger in 2033 than it had previously expected.

Immigration could help reduce the federal deficit by boosting growth and increasing the working-age tax base, Ms. Edelberg said, though the impact on state and local finances is more complicated as they provide services like public schooling.

But there are a lot of uncertainties. For one thing, nobody knows how long today’s big immigration flows will last. Many are spurred by geopolitical instability, including economic crisis and crime in Venezuela, violence in Congo, and humanitarian crises across other parts of Africa and the Middle East.

The C.B.O. itself has based its projections on guesses: It has immigration trailing off through 2026 because it anticipates a slow reversion to normal, not because it is actually clear when or how quickly immigration will taper.

National policies could also reshape how many people are able to come to — and stay in — the United States.

The influx of immigrants has caused problems in many places as the surge in population overwhelms local support systems and leads to competition for a limited supply of housing. As that happens, immigration has become an increasingly critical political issue, surging to the top of the list of the nation’s most important problems in Gallup polling.

Former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, has warned of an immigrant-created crime wave. He has pledged to deport undocumented immigrants en masse if he wins the presidential election in November.

The Biden administration has used its executive authority to open a back door to allow thousands of migrants into the United States temporarily, while also taking steps to repair the legal refugee program. But as Democratic leaders have joined Republicans in criticizing President Biden over migration in recent months, he has embraced a more conservative tone, even pledging to “shut down” the border if Congress passed a bill empowering him to do so.

Politics are not the only wild card: The economy could also slow. If that happened, fewer immigrants might want to come to the United States, and those who did might struggle to find work.

Some economists fret that immigrants will compete against American workers for jobs, particularly those with lower skill levels, which could become a more pressing concern in a weaker employment market. But recent economic research has suggested that immigrants mostly compete with one another for work, since they tend to work in different roles from those of native-born Americans.

At the Luke’s Lobster processing plant in Saco, Maine, Mr. Conniff has often struggled to find enough help over the years, despite pay that starts at $16 per hour. But he has hired people like Chenda Chamreoun, 30, who came to the United States from Cambodia in 2013 and worked her way up from lobster cleaning to quality assurance supervisor as she learned English.

Now, she is in the process of starting her own catering business. Immigrants tend to be more entrepreneurial than the nation as a whole — another reason that they could make the American economy more innovative and productive as its population ages.

Ms. Chamreoun explained that the move to the United States was challenging, but that it had taught her how to realize goals. “You have more abilities than you think.”

J. Edward Moreno contributed reporting from New York, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington.

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ECB members say inflation job nearly done but tariff risks loom

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Guests and attendeess mingle and walk through the atrium during the IMF/World Bank Group Spring Meetings at the IMF headquarters in Washington, DC, on April 24, 2025.

Jim Watson | Afp | Getty Images

After years dominated by the pandemic, supply chains, energy and inflation, there was a new topic topping the agenda at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s Spring Meetings this year: tariffs.

The IMF set the tone by kicking off the week with the release of its latest economic forecasts, which cut growth outlooks for the U.S., U.K. and many Asian countries. While economists, central bankers and politicians have been engaged in panels and behind-the-scenes talks, many are attempting to work out whether trade tensions between China and the U.S. are — or perhaps are not — cooling.

Policymakers from the European Central Bank that CNBC spoke to this week broadly stuck a dovish-leaning tone, indicating they saw interest rates continuing to fall and few upside risks to euro zone inflation. However, all stressed the current high levels of uncertainty, the need to keep monitoring data, and the high risks to the growth outlook — sentiments also echoed by Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey in his interview with CNBC on Thursday.

These were some of the main messages from ECB members this week.

Christine Lagarde, European Central Bank president

On inflation and monetary policy:

“We’re heading towards our [inflation] target in the course of 2025, so that disinflationary process is so much on track that we are nearing completion. But we have the shocks, you know, and the shocks will be a dampen on GDP. It’s a negative shock to demand.”

“The net impact on inflation will depend on what countermeasures are eventually taken by Europe. Then we have to take into account the [German] fiscal push by the defense investments, by the infrastructure fund.”

“We have seen successive movements, you know, announcement [of U.S. tariffs], and then a pause, and then some exemptions. So we have to be very attentive… Either we cut, either we pause, but we will be data dependent to the extreme.”

Watch CNBC's full interview with ECB president Christine Lagarde

On market moves:

“When we had done our projections, we anticipated that… the dollar would appreciate, the euro would depreciate. It’s not what we saw. And there have been some counter-intuitive movements in various categories.”

“The German market has obviously been shocked in a positive way by the program soon to be put in place by the German government, with a commitment to defense, with a commitment to a big fund for infrastructure development.”

Klaas Knot, The Netherlands Bank president

On tariff uncertainty:

“If I look back over the last 14 years, in the initial days of the pandemic I think that was comparable uncertainty to what we have now.”

“In the short run, it’s crystal clear that the uncertainty that is created by the unpredictability of the tariff actions by the U.S. government works as a strong negative factor for growth. Basically, uncertainty is like a tax without revenue.”

On the inflation impact:

“In the short run, we will have lower growth. We will probably also have lower inflation. As we also see, the euro is appreciating as energy prices have also come down. So together with the sort of negative factor uncertainty in the short run, it’s crystal clear that it will accelerate the disinflation.”

It's 'crystal clear' that tariffs could hit growth in the short term, ECB's Knot says

“But in the medium term, the inflation outlook is not all that clear. I think there are still these negative factors. But in the medium term, you might get retaliation. You might get the disruption of global value chains, which might also be inflationary in other parts of the world than the U.S. only. And then, of course, we have the fiscal policy coming in in Europe. So this is actually a time in which you need projections.”

On a June rate cut and market pricing for two more ECB rate cuts in 2025:

“I’m fully open minded. I think it’s way too early to already take a position on June, whether it would be another cut. It will fully depend on these projections.”

“I would need to see a more structured analysis of the impact on the inflation profile ahead of us, and only then can I say whether the market is pricing fair or whether I don’t.”

Robert Holzmann, Austrian National Bank governor

On the need to wait for more data and news on tariffs:

“We have not seen this uncertainty now for years… unless the uncertainty subsides, by the right decisions, we will have to hold back a number of our decisions, and hence, we don’t know yet in what direction monetary policy should be best moved.”

“Before looking at data in detail, the question is, what kind of political decisions will be taken? Is it that we will have some tariff increases? Is it that we will have strong tariff increases? Is it that we will have retribution by high counter tariffs?”

We have not seen this much uncertainty for years, Austrian central bank governor says

On the ECB’s April rate cut:

“I think there’s a broad consensus [on rates]. But of course, at the margin, people differ.”

“My assessment is that at this time, it wasn’t clear yet to what extent [tariff] countermeasures were being taken. Because with countermeasures in Europe, prices may have increased. Without countermeasures, quite likely the price pressure is downward. And for the time being, we don’t know yet the direction.”

On the direction of interest rates:

“I think if the recent noises about an arrangement [on trade] were to be true, in this case, quite likely it is more towards the downside than the upside with regard to prices. But this can be changed with different decisions and the result of which, we may even imagine in [the] other direction. For the time being, no, it will be down.”

“There may be further cuts this year, but the number is still outstanding.”

Mārtiņš Kazāks, Bank of Latvia governor

On opportunity from tariffs:

“With all this uncertainty and vulnerability, this is also the time of opportunities for Europe.”

“It’s a time for Europe to grasp all the aspects of being an economic superpower and becoming a really fully-fledged political and geopolitical superpower, and this requires doing all the decisions that in the past, were not carried out fully.”

“This requires political will, political guts to make those decisions, and to strengthen the European economy and assert its place in a global world.”

Global vulnerability an opportunity for Europe, says ECB's Kazāks

On market reaction to tariffs:

“So far it seems to be relatively orderly … but if one looks at the spillovers to Europe, the financial markets are working more or less fine, we haven’t seen spreads exploding or anything like that.”

“But in terms, however, of the macro scenarios, this uncertainty is extremely elevated in the sense that, given the possible outcomes, the multiple scenarios and their probabilities are very similar with the baseline [tariff] scenario.”

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Economics

Trump insists bond market tumult didn’t influence tariff pause: ‘I wasn’t worried’

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US President Donald Trump speaks during a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister of Norway Jonas Gahr Store in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on April 24, 2025.

Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images

President Donald Trump denied that an aggressive bond market sell-off influenced his decision earlier this month to hold off on aggressive “reciprocal” tariffs against U.S. trading partners.

“I wasn’t worried,” Trump said in a Time magazine interview during which he was asked about financial market tumult after his April 2 “liberation day” announcement.

In the decree, Trump slapped 10% across-the-board duties against all U.S. imports and released list of tariffs against dozens of other nations. The extra levies were based on trade deficits the U.S. had against the respective countries and raised fears about inflation, a potential recession and disruption of long-held trade agreements.

Markets recoiled following the release. Treasury yields initially headed lower but quickly snapped higher. The 10-year yield rose half a percentage point in just a few days, one of its quickest moves ever, as investors also ditched stocks and the U.S. dollar.

Ultimately, Trump issued a 90-day stay on the reciprocal tariffs to allow time for negotiation. But he said it wasn’t because of the market tumult.

Pres. Trump to TIME: Would consider it a total victory if U.S. still has 50% tariffs in a year

“No, it wasn’t for that reason,” Trump told Time in the interview from Tuesday that was published Friday. “I’m doing that until we come up with the numbers that I want to come up with. I’ve met with a lot of countries. I’ve talked on the telephone. I don’t even want them to come in.”

Yields have since moved lower, with the 10-year most recently around 4.28%, about a quarter percentage point higher than its recent low. Trump had said when he made the decision to hold off that the bond market had gotten the “yips.”

“The bond market was getting the yips, but I wasn’t. Because I know what we have,” he said. “I know what we have, but I also know we won’t have it for long if we allowed four more years of the gross incompetence. This thing was just running — it was running as a free spirit. This was — this was the most incompetent president in history.”

Though negotiations over tariffs are ongoing, Trump added that he would consider it a “total victory” even if the U.S. has levies as high as 50% still in place a year from now.

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Bank of England chief focused on tariff ‘growth shock’

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Bank of England governor: We're seeing the uncertainty effect of tariffs

The Bank of England is focused on the potential impact of U.S. tariffs on U.K. economic growth if there is a slowdown in global trade, the central bank’s governor Andrew Bailey said Thursday.

“We’re certainly quite focused on the growth shock,” Bailey told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in an interview at the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings.

Going into its May 8 monetary policy meeting, the central bank will consider “arguments on both sides” around the impact of tariffs on growth and domestic supply constraints on inflation, Bailey said.

“There is clearly a growth issue we start with, with weak growth … but a big question mark is how much of that is caused by the weak demand, how much of it is caused by a weak supply side,” he continued.

“Because the weak supply side, of course, unfortunately, has the sort of the upside effect on inflation. So we’ve got to balance those two. But I think the trade issue is now the new part of that story.”

Inflation could be pulled in either direction by wider forces, with a redirection of trade exports into other markets being disinflationary, but a retaliation on U.S. tariffs by the U.K. government — which he stressed did not appear likely — pushing up inflation.

Bailey added that he did not see the U.K. as being close to a recession at present, but that it was clear economic uncertainty was weighing on business and consumer confidence.

IMF downgrade

The IMF earlier this week downgraded its 2025 growth forecast for the U.K. to 1.1% from 1.6%, citing the impact of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs, higher borrowing costs and increased energy prices.

However, economic forecasting remains mired in uncertainty as countries engage in negotiations with U.S. officials over Trump’s swingeing universal tariff policy, currently on pause. The U.S. has imposed 25% tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos and a 10% levy on other British exports.

U.K. policymakers have expressed hopes of reaching a trade deal with the White House, with U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance saying there is a “good chance” of an agreement.

Bailey told CNBC on Thursday that he would be “very encouraged if the U.K. does make a deal,” but that its economy was very open and services-oriented, so it would still be impacted by a wider slowdown in growth or trade.

He also noted that inflation would increase from the current 2.6% in the coming readings due to effects from markets such as energy prices and water bills, but that the bump up would be “nothing like what we saw a few years ago.”

The Bank of England held interest rates at 4.5% at its March meeting, before Trump shocked the world with the scale of his tariff announcement.

Markets now see the BOE slashing rates to 4% by its August meeting.

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