How immigrants are helping keep job growth hot while inflation cools

• Immigration has helped the U.S. job market sustain a fiery run in recent months without reigniting inflation, economists and analysts say.
• The U.S. economy added a whopping 272,000 jobs in May, but the consumer price index was unchanged.
• This dynamic — a hot job market and cooling inflation — is in part the result of increased inflows of immigrants.
• Recent spikes in immigration at the southern border and elsewhere in the U.S. have helped keep the labor pool full even as job gains kept apace.

Immigration — both authorized and unauthorized — has helped the U.S. job market sustain a fiery run in recent months without reigniting inflation, economists and analysts say. The effect has been a favorable, though uncertain, situation for President Joe Biden ahead of the November election.

A blockbuster May jobs report showed that the U.S. economy added 272,000 jobs last month, well above the Dow Jones' forecast of 190,000. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week that consumer prices in May remained unchanged, and even fell slightly on an annual basis.

This dynamic — a heating job market and cooling inflation — is in part the result of increased inflows of immigrants.

"Recent immigrants have flowed disproportionately into the parts of the labor force that were particularly tight in 2022, contributing to labor supply in places where it was most badly needed," Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a note to clients in May.

The May jobs report found that government, leisure and hospitality, and health-care sectors saw the most growth.

"The immigration surge poses lots of challenges to communities across the country, but it came at a very fortuitous time to help ease the labor market pressure, when the Fed was working