Pay no attention to that foreign-born worker “You can’t grow like this with just the native workforce. It’s not possible,” says Pia Orrenius, vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The Washington Post’s online front page this morning blares that immigration is fueling the “roaring” U.S. economy. And you thought there was a border crisis, a crisis hyped by Republicans who believe it can wait for the November election. “About 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data,” The Post reports. By the middle of 2022, rapid growth in the foreign-born labor force “closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic“: Immigrant workers also recovered much faster than native-born workers from the pandemic’s disruptions, and many saw some of the largest wage gains in industries eager to hire. Economists and labor experts say the surge in employment was ultimately key to solving unprecedented gaps in the economy that threatened the country’s ability to recover from prolonged shutdowns. Even so, apprehensions of migrants at the southern border topped 2 million in fiscal 2023 for the second straight year. Washington is deadlocked on a solution to the crisis. Senate Republicans and a handful of Democrats voted down a sweeping $118 billion national security package that included changes to the nation’s asylum system and a way to effectively close the border to most migrants when crossings are particularly…