One of the releases from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that gets relatively little attention is its annual projections for growth in employment by industry and occupation over the next decade. BLS’s latest numbers are worth at least a few minutes of thought.

BLS projects that the economy will add 5.2 million jobs between 2024 and 2034, an average of 520,000 a year or 43,000 a month. That compares to job growth of 19.2 million in the decade from 2014 to 2024.

The slower job growth should not be a surprise. Immigrants accounted for 6.6 million of the job growth in the decade from 2014 to 2024. As a matter of policy, the government is now sharply limiting immigration going forward and deporting many of the people who are already here. The growth of foreign-born workers in the labor force will clearly be far less going forward than it was in the last decade.

The baby boom cohorts are also retiring in large numbers. In 2024 the baby boomers were between the ages of 60 and 78. By the year 2034, the youngest baby boomers will be turning 70. Very few boomers will still be in the workforce at that point.

While women’s labor force participation can still rise some to match rates in other wealthy countries, the participation rate for prime-age women (ages 25 to 54) has been nearly stagnant for a quarter century. Policies like improved childcare, more flexible work schedules, and increased opportunities to work from home can increase participation, but we seem to be headed in the opposite direction at the moment.

The BLS projections imply employment will grow at the rate of 0.3 percent annually over the next decade. GDP growth is roughly equal to the sum of employment growth and productivity growth. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that productivity growth would average 1.6 percent over the decade, which would imply average GDP growth of 1.9 percent.

However, productivity growth averaged just 0.3 percent in the first half of 2025. It would be wrong to extrapolate from such a short and unusual period, but it does point to a risk of things going badly. Of course, if AI and other technologies pan out as the optimists hope, we could do much better than the CBO projections.

It is also worth noting the distribution of the projected job gains. BLS projects that just under 2 million of the new jobs, or a bit less than 40 percent, will be in the categories of healthcare and social assistance. Professional, science and technical services are projected to account for 16 percent of the job gains and restaurants and hotels for 11 percent. Manufacturing is projected to lose a small number of jobs over the decade, while employment in the mining sector is projected to fall by 1.6 percent.

BLS’s track record with these projections has not been great. In 2014 it projected job growth of 9.8 million over the next decade. As noted earlier, the actual number ended up being 19.2 million, which was boosted by the large inflow of immigrants, especially in the years following the pandemic.

The errors have gone both ways. In 2004, BLS projected the economy would add 18.9 million jobs. It ended up adding just 7.2 million jobs over the decade. They obviously did not anticipate the collapse of the housing bubble and resulting financial crisis and recession.

Given these misses, we probably should not put too much confidence in the employment projections for the next decade. However, they are reasonable extrapolations of recent trends and known demographic features, like the aging of the population.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Fewer Immigrants Means Fewer Workers, Less Growth appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.