Immigration and investment skew productivity

Short‑term measured productivity jumps can be mechanically inflated by non‑AI forces — for example, removing lower‑productivity immigrant workers from the labor force or surges in capital utilization from front‑loaded AI and data‑center investment. That makes it hard to attribute single‑year productivity revisions to AI without decomposing demographic and capital‑utilization effects. — If policymakers misattribute productivity gains to AI when they actually reflect compositional shifts or investment timing, they may adopt the wrong labor, immigration, and industrial policies.