On the program today, we'll take another couple of passes at the Fed meeting.

We'll talk China for a bit, and AI comes to your recycling bin.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Los Angeles, I'm Kai Rizdahl. It is Thursday, today the 11th of December. It is always to have you along, everybody.

As usually happens, Chair Powell covered a lot of ground in his post-meeting press conference the other day.

The central bank's balance sheet was a topic of conversation, what he thinks tariffs are doing to inflation,

what he wants his legacy to be, seeing as how he's only got three meetings left before running this economy as somebody else's job.

Also, immigration and the macro economy.

He talked about how job gains have slowed

significantly since earlier this year and how that's likely connected to the Trump administration's

immigration policy. And it turns out, as Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval is about to tell us,

not only is immigration a labor market story, it's a monetary policy story, too.

To support stable prices and maximum employment, the Fed must decide whether labor

department data is hot or cold. But to understand that, you have to understand what's

happening with the immigrant population. Michael Strain with the American Enterprise Institute says

that's because immigrants made up a huge number of new job seekers under President Biden. But

unemployment was steady because massive amounts of new jobs were also created. If we had a month

where the economy added 250,000 net new jobs, you know, that looked like a decent month.

Those new job seekers from other countries found jobs.

But if the number of foreign-born people drops dramatically as it has under President Trump relative to President Biden, then the number of net new jobs you need for a decent month drops dramatically.

Now, there are far fewer new job seekers out there because of restrictive immigration policies.

So the goalposts for what healthy job growth looks like changed.

That could make for some pretty interesting labor data ahead, says economist Yelena Shilitova

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