No Labor Shortage: Millions of Working-Age Americans Still Not in Workforce

Millions of native-born Americans at their prime working age remain out of the nation’s labor market, new analysis details. The labor force participation rate was 62.4% in September 2025. 

Center for Immigration Studies researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler published the analysis this week, showing that the share of American men and women who are working age but who are not in the workforce is still historically high.

In particular, just 11.3 percent of working-age American men were out of the labor market. Today, more than 21 percent of working-age American men are not in the labor market.

Even among American men considered to be in their prime for employment, age 25 to 54, more than 11 percent today are not holding jobs. That figure was just four percent in 1960. Put another way, the researchers found, millions of American men have dropped out of the workforce in the last 65 years.

READ: Can we Restore the American Work Ethic?

“If the same share of U.S.-born men (16 to 64) were in the labor force in 2025 as in 1960, there would be 8.9 million more U.S.-born men in the labor force,” Camarota and Zeigler write. “Even if the share returned only to the 2000 level, it would still add 4.1 million U.S.-born men to the labor force.”

Center for Immigration Studies

Center for Immigration Studies

The researchers note that mass immigration, where the U.S. imports more than a million green card-holders every year, for the sake of filling open American jobs is not justified when reviewing the growing share of  Americans who are able-bodied but not in the labor market:

This is germane to the immigration debate because one of the primary justifications for large-scale legal immigration, and even tolerating illegal immigration, is that there are not enough people to fill all of the jobs available. But to make that argument one has to ignore or at least dismiss concern over the enormous number of working-age, U.S.-born men and women not in the labor force and all the problems this creates for society. [Emphasis added]

The researchers suggested various reforms that the Trump administration and Congress can undertake to fix the issue — including welfare reforms, combating the opioid crisis, reviewing the U.S. approach to globalization, and, most significantly, reducing legal immigration levels.

“We have a choice as a country: We can either adopt policies designed to get more working-age Americans currently on the economic sidelines into jobs or we can ignore the problem and continue to bring in ever more immigrants and then try to manage all the pathologies associated with our higher rate of the working-age not in the labor force,” Camarota and Zeigler write.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
 

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