"Corporate America is fixated on the wrong headline risk. While boardrooms debate model updates and AI guardrails, the more immediate threat is hiding in plain sight: the quiet hollowing out of the workforce-and the middle class that underwrites it. In just three months of 2025, 1.147 million foreign-born workers disappeared from the U.S. labor force, nearly a third of them foreign-born women. Over the same quarter, nearly 300,000 Black women were pushed out of the workforce. Those aren't statistical blips; they're structural alarms."
"Meanwhile, foreign-born women continue to have a participation rate of around 56%, which is significantly lower than the 77% rate for foreign-born men and slightly below the 57.8% rate for native-born women. Many of these women are funneled into caregiving, hospitality, food service, and domestic work-sectors that are undervalued, underpaid, and highly exposed to volatility. Layer on credentialing barriers, visa restrictions, wage theft in informal jobs, and chronically unaffordable childcare, and the result is predictable: talent exits."
Corporate focus on AI and headline risks obscures a faster, deeper threat: rapid exits from the labor force that hollow out the workforce and middle class. In the first quarter of 2025, 1.147 million foreign-born workers left the U.S. labor force, including nearly a third who were women, while nearly 300,000 Black women exited over the same period. Black women's participation plunged two percentage points in three months. Foreign-born women participate at roughly 56%, far below foreign-born men's 77% and slightly below native-born women's 57.8%. Concentration in undervalued, volatile sectors and systemic barriers—visa limits, credentialing, wage theft, unaffordable childcare—drive talent loss and weaken banks, insurers, and local economies.
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