". . . For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive . . ."

                                       —William Shakespeare

Where do we get the skilled workforce that we need to build our future? That is the essential, existential issue; not finding cheap labor for "markets" today.

What is most important is that we fire the imaginations of our young people, that we create the most human of desires: to go to the frontiers.

Labor Power

Today, a conflation of formal statistics and guess-estimates are circulated. Whether it is 3.3 million illegal immigrants [See Appendix B] who entered the U.S. in 2023, or even eight or ten million over the last few years, we understand it now as an existential threat! It is President Donald Trump and the vast majority of American people who agree: we must close the border to illegal immigration!

At the same time—perhaps the reader is unaware?—a multitude of think tanks, institutes, and legacy media outlets proclaim that expanding legal and illegal immigration actually insured that "the pressure was taken off" of labor shortages and a "soft landing" from high inflation levels is being achieved. All this is horse-feathers. Yet their lobbyists have ruled within the precincts of Washington, DC—until now.

Until now, no side in this mash-up, even the well-meaning, have started from the most fundamental issue: labor power. That is, the development of creative, individual cognitive potential. This is, after all, all about the human capital essential to creating America's future.

Economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche refined the concept of labor power, starting with his discovery—and its implications—regarding the profound role of individual, human creativity. You can view his concept here. Human creativity is knowable and can be promoted. Prometheus Action will have more to say about this in the near future.

Consider this: President Trump has rightfully called for the building of "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of big, beautiful power plants" to fuel the rebuilding of our United States as a "manufacturing superpower." To do so, we must produce the bill of materials required for those hundreds and hundreds of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, and the labor force so-required. Where will this skilled workforce and this "supply chain" of production come from? How will it be created? In short, the answer is that it must come from We the People.

Now, more than perhaps ever, we are challenged to take a step back and consider what WE are all here for. It is reliably reported to us in Genesis, the holy scripture of all of the Abrahamic religions:

26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

This standpoint here is not merely "ancient," but a timeless expression of the Christian and Promethean, and it was out of our classically informed Renaissance culture that our nation came.

As a young Abraham Lincoln proclaimed,

All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner.

The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various ``leads'' from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny.

In the beginning, the mine was unopened, and the miner stood naked, and knowledgeless, upon it.

Fishes, birds, beasts, and creeping things, are not miners, but feeders and lodgers, merely. Beavers build houses; but they build them in nowise differently, or better now, than they did, five thousand years ago. Ants, and honey-bees, provide food for winter; but just in the same way they did, when Solomon referred the sluggard to them as patterns of prudence.

Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions.  

Can one disagree? Would one dare to disagree? Turn now to our troubled labor force.

Two Million More Part-Time Workers: The "Gig Economy,""Self-Employed Contractors," & Reduced Hours

The US employment numbers are growing, even as Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) measures of workforce participation rates numbers are shrinking, and official unemployment remains relatively low. What is going on?

It is eye-opening that it was part-time employment which increased by two million, from just March of 2023 to March of 2024, a figure drawn from the published data of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

BLS data documents report that "self-employed workers (unincorporated)" in part-time work increased by 400,000 in one year, March, 2023 to March, 2024. That is from 9,087,000 to 9,487,000 self-employed workers in part time work. This is based on the BLS "Household Survey,"* which attempts to capture self-employed data.

The Fed's chart, drawing on only part of the same BLS data, shows that in "All Industries," the number of those "working part-time for economic reasons"** in industry has increased by an additional 200,000 from March of 2023 to March of 2024.   

Combining just these last two figures to arrive at a rough estimate, it can be seen that part-time employment increased by 600,000 in the last year, March to March, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics' "Household Survey."**

In addition, the number of persons now working part-time "for non-economic reasons” (childcare problems, family or personal obligations, school or training, retirement or Social Security limits on earnings, etc.) also increased by roughly 1,500,000 souls—from 21.5 to over 23 million part-time workers. In sum, a rough total of over two million workers were added to part-time employment, just between March of 2023 and March of 2024.

[*Note: It matters in the number-crunching because the BLS—business survey (The CES or "establishment survey") counts the number of people employed, hours worked, wages, etc. by 119,000 businesses and government agencies. It is important to note that if a worker is employed by more than one of those businesses or agencies, he or she is counted multiple times.

The CPS or "household survey" has the advantage of being more expansive in scope than the establishment survey because it directly samples 60,000 households. The intention is to include self-employed workers whose businesses are unincorporated, unpaid family workers, agricultural workers, and private household workers. However, neither survey collects data, "on the legal status of workers."

[**Note: "Part Time for economic reasons" officially refers to those who work part-time (1 to 34 hours/week) for an economic reason such as slack work or unfavorable business conditions, inability to find full-time work, or seasonal declines in demand.]  

What a Tangled Web We Have Woven for Ourselves!

No one actually knows how many workers are now in the U.S. workforce; or how many are actually working only part-time. No one knows how many illegal immigrants are in our country; and no one knows how many illegal immigrants are now actually in the US workforce.

U.S. employment figures contain a mystery that has left many economists scratching their heads: How is the country generating so many jobs even while the unemployment rate has drifted up?

The emerging consensus: a surge in immigration. It not only explains inconsistencies in the jobs data but suggests the economy can keep adding plenty of jobs without overheating. That in turn would let the Federal Reserve still consider interest-rate cuts.

Immigrant Labor and the US Workforce

It is recent immigrant labor, now fueled by the Biden collective's "Immigration Parole" program, that is filling—and otherwise generating—these part-time jobs.

The Federal Reserve, utilizing BLS figures, produced the following graph:

The number of foreign-born employees has grown to some 31 million, out of a civilian workforce of 168 million, increasing by some six million since Biden soiled the White House.

Further, the "labor force participation rate" among immigrants is higher than among native-born, partly due to their average age. The pathetic Jerome Powell, current Federal Reserve Chairman, has spoken to this, including to the House Financial Services Committee:

“It’s just arithmetic. If you add a couple million people to an economy, a percentage of them work, there will be more output.”

“I’m just reporting the facts there,” he added. “I’m not going to say anything is needed for the future or good policy indirectly or directly. I think it’s just reporting the facts to say that immigration and labor force participation both contributed to the very strong economic output growth that we had last year.”

There is a grim, cold, actuarial figure.  Only a similar "Scrooge" would be impressed.

With "Bidenonomics," the jobs being created are almost entirely in services—hospitality (restaurants, hotels, etc), healthcare, financial support, and government employment. What is missed in most public discussion is that much of this immigrant labor, both legal and illegal, is being employed in non-productive activity.  We are not addressing our root problems, at a point when less than 25% of our workforce is employed in industrial jobs, productive jobs which focus on producing industrial goods through the manufacturing process. We continue to waste our productive potential, our labor power!

Economic activity in the manufacturing sector barely inched forward in March, 2024 aftercontracting for 16 consecutive months. This, despite the massive federal subsidies to the computer chip industry for new factories, and to filling in pot holes in yesteryear's infrastructure. Little new employment there.

Slave Labor—An Apocalyptic End Time To Be Averted!

Consider the profundity of Genesis, President Abraham Lincoln, and physical economist Lyndon LaRouche. From that vantage point, we can thoughtfully consider the plethora of foundation-backed and "woke" think tanks, institutes, and media outlets that have been endlessly proclaiming that “we need cheap labor,” and shouting that "five million jobs" are unfilled. Their lobbyists and shadow funds have been buying up the Congress on both sides of the aisle, and that time is coming to an end.

Nancy Pelosi told us that Florida farmers needed new immigrants to "pick the crops." She was rightfully denounced. Likewise, the Brooking Institute and insider banksters at Morgan Stanley now proclaim that a flood of immigrants is stabilizing the US economy and insuring a "soft landing." No one believes them.

There has been no such “soft landing,” as American citizens are suffering from record food, energy, & housing prices, and received wages and incomes that never catch up.  With manufacturing jobs stagnating, and "green" swindles dumping more of our human and physical resources into the burn pit every day, the secular tendency of inflation is again trending hyperbolic.

President Donald Trump is ascendant, despite the hybrid war directed at him. The Malthusians, organized by the financial oligarchy centered in "The City" of London and Wall Street, are now desperately scrambling to find some means of imposing a corporatist (fascist) slave labor solution; they are intent on more Congressional and Biden collective rules-making for behaviorist social control, and endless war, to that end. That won't work either.

Today

Consider that today, 31 million of our American workforce are recognized as foreign-born, this according to the Federal Reserve. That will soon be acknowledged to be approximately 20% of our workforce. This BLS (BS) data that the Fed's chart is based on includes, "legally admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants." How accurate those BLS figures are, regarding "undocumented" immigrants, is a highly-charged question! The numbers could be much higher, but it should really be asked: what, after all, are we producing?

Without Immigration, U.S. Population Growth Is Negative

It should be clear that we must produce new generations of productive workers and employ them accordingly. This requires the national banking and national credit polices that Trump's Agenda 47 speaks to, and LaRouchePAC and Promeathean Action are elaborating. To this same end, this author proposed to the Trump administration, the adoption of a "Space CCC," inspired by the 50th anniversary of the U.S.'s successful landing on the Moon, and driven by Trump's announced "Artemis" program, to go back to colonize the Moon and go to Mars and beyond.

In regard to immigration, it can truly said that, without finding our way to an effective new system for legal immigration, or if we simply halted all new immigration, we would be flat-lining U.S. population numbers, or worse.

Right now, without immigration, U.S. population growth would be negative. A U.S. Census Bureau report, released in November, 2023, states that, "The zero-immigration scenario projects that population declines would start in 2024 in the complete absence of foreign-born immigration. The population in this scenario is projected to be 226 million in 2100, roughly 107 million lower than the 2022 estimate."

Clearly, given an already aging population, under this suggested scenario we would be shrinking our future, creative human potential, our human capital - our store of labor power.

Now consider that even Japan, an alleged "closed society," is now opening its doors ever wider to net-immigration, due to Japan's negative-population growth demographics and the knock-on consequences for its workforce.

We cannot dwell here on our need for family formation, for young families and standards of living that create "breadwinner" households in which a single income can support a family of three or four children—or more. There is indeed a twinkling of an optimistic note, in that live births within the bonds of marriage have been going up, as a percentage of over all live births, over the last ten years. Births outside of wedlock are diminishing, which can be assessed as a positive change.

The rough, publicized estimates are that there are a total of at least 11-12 million illegal immigrants in the country right now. Congress, to date, refuses to act to stop the flow of illegal immigrants, that officially topped 250,000 in December, and official figures in 2024 are showing that the number of encounters has been running above those of last year. Predatory financial interests publicly push illegal immigration into the US, to expand the available (cheap) workforce and sow divisive political chaos—divide and conquer.

This is not just about Democrats wanting Democratic voters, it is that cheap labor and divisive politics are what the financial oligarchy wishes to impose on America. One dominated by push-button, no-solution issues.

Here is a crystallization of the globalist free traders’ commitment to promoting immigration (in whatever form) and national security (read, "endless wars.")

". . . The effort to modernize US immigration policy has famously failed for decades, hung up on words like amnesty and asylum. Allowing the immigration flow to dwindle has significant implications—and they’re not good—for the US’s economic future and national security.

In Conclusion

There has always been another way. Abraham Lincoln optimistically calculated the future growth of the United States. For Abraham Lincoln, an equal chance to succeed in life is the great promise of America. Lincoln proclaimed it "the right to rise."

Historians have largely overlooked one of President Lincoln’s signature pieces of legislation, The Act to Encourage Immigration, July 4th, 1864, the first—and we should hope—not the last important law in American history intent on an affirmative approach to legal immigration. President Lincoln saw a bright future of the United States. We should too, by incorporating the development of the Power of Labor, including a Space CCC program, in thinking about our future.

Required Labor Policy: A Space C.C.C.

In 2020, this author formally proposed, to the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board of the Trump administration, a "Space CCC" labor force initiative to train up millions of young Americans to be part of our future advanced workforce. Forget "green" fascism. A Space CCC program would build off the excitement of the 50th anniversary of our first landing on the Moon, and President Trump's newly announced Artemis program to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. It would be a critical part of rebuilding the United States as that City on the Hill that John Winthrop intended, and that for Mankind is indispensable.

Now looking toward 2025, and the required development of America's future productive workforce, such an initiative must be implemented. We can train up our future workforce, from among all Americans, wherever they hailed from.