An alarming percentage of working-age American men have exited the labor force in recent decades, threatening profound negative social consequences in the very near future. This is an unignorable and dire phenomenon that should not be a divisive issue. The trend has been ominously noted by observers on both left and right. However, with President-elect Donald Trump returning to the White House, armed with a sweeping voter mandate for change, could it finally be the time to right the ship before a tipping point is reached?
The numbers are indeed alarming. “The share of US-born, working-age (16 to 64) men not in the labor force has increased for six decades. It was 11.3 percent in April 1960, 16.9 percent in April 2000, and 22.1 percent in April 2024,” according to a December 19 report by the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank opposed to massive illegal immigration.
“Among ‘prime-age’ US-born men (25 to 54), the group most likely to work, the share not in the labor force was 4 percent in April 1960, 8.5 percent in 2000 and 11.6 percent in 2024,” the report stressed.
Guess what else has exploded over a similar time frame?
“The number of US-born men (16 to 64) not in the labor force increased by 13.2 million from 1960 to 2024. At the same time, the number of working-age immigrant men in the labor force increased by 14.1 million,” CIS details.
‘Triple the Percentage Recorded in 1955’
And here’s where the divisiveness kicks in. The strongly implied correlation between the precipitous decline in American working men and the rise of cheap illegal alien labor in the US over the past 50+ years sparks a controversy among a political left that otherwise does not deny the social tragedy of plummeting American male workforce participation.
“According to Carol Graham, a senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings [Institution], the labor force participation rate of prime working-age men has been declining over the last 20 years,” big-box media outlet Business Insider reported in August. “Today, 10% of men aged 25-54 don’t have a job and aren’t looking for one, more than triple the percentage recorded in 1955, when just 3% were out of the workforce, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”
“That amounts to around seven million prime working-age men who aren’t working,” the publication noted.
If that seven-million number sounds familiar, it’s because Vice President-elect JD Vance became a lightning rod for criticism in October when he referenced it in a verbal showdown with a reporter from The New York Times.
Asked by the “not arguing in favor of illegal immigration” journalist how America’s construction industry could survive without an ample supply of “undocumented” labor, Vance had a ready answer. “I think that what you would do is you would take, let’s say for example, the seven million prime-age men who have dropped out of the labor force, and you have a smaller number of women… you absolutely could re-engage folks into the American labor market,” he replied.
“People say, ‘Well, Americans won’t do those jobs,’” Vance continued. “Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages, but people will do those jobs.”
Men Without Meaning
The Brookings Institution is a Washington, DC, think tank squarely aligned with the ruling progressive establishment. Carol Graham, its “senior fellow in Economic Studies,” fully acknowledges the seven-million statistic and its potentially catastrophic social effects.
“Some of [these men] drop out [of college] and are just sort of forlorn and have no purpose or meaning in life. They’re not very likely to be married. They’re very likely to be living in their parent’s basement,” Graham told Business Insider. “They’re lonely, they’re isolated.”
Too many of them are also dying. Unemployed males are significantly overrepresented in the opioid scourge that has devastated the United States this century.
“What changed?” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) asked in an article he wrote for Compact magazine in October. He then answered his own question:
“The most obvious answer is the bipartisan economic consensus that came to dominate American politics in the aftermath of the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, a generation of elites embraced the international flow of goods, assets, and labor as an unalloyed benefit to the nation.
“They established one-sided ‘free trade’ with Communist China, rewarded offshoring, and spread an open-borders philosophy that captured both major parties, as well as much of Big Labor. Millions of American blue-collar jobs disappeared, and the foreign-born share of the population ballooned out of proportion.”
Rubio is now poised to be secretary of State in the second Trump administration. The president-elect has vowed to carry out the most extensive mass deportation program in US history. Meanwhile, some seven million working-age males silently sit on the sidelines, unable to envision a future that encompasses classic “American Dream” staples such as marriage, children, and home ownership.
The problem is plain to see, and causative factors are not difficult to detect. As the Obama era of identity politics victimhood fades away with a whimper in the last days of a weary Biden administration, can the nation now turn its focus to putting millions of despairing working-age men back in touch with that beautiful dream?
