Blockbuster job growth continues to power the U.S. economy, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting 303,000 payrolls added in March.

Usually, such strong growth might signal that inflation could pick up. If employers see more demand for goods and services, they need to hire more workers — and if there aren’t enough workers, they have to increase pay, which increases the overall cost of running the business.

But while annual price growth, at more than 3%, remains above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, it is still well below the 9% peak seen in the summer of 2022.

Economists increasingly believe that the post-pandemic surge in immigration is a key reason the economy has been able to grow steadily without pushing inflation higher, as the new arrivals have helped employers fill roles at levels of pay that have kept a lid on overall price growth.

In a note to clients published Friday, titled “Why we have both strong growth and lower inflation,” Goldman Sachs chief U.S. economist David Mericle said rising immigration had boosted labor force growth. As a result, the strong demand that consumers continue to exhibit elsewhere is unlikely to raise prices by much, “if at all,” he said.

In fact, so far, measures of labor market “tightness,” like wages, “have continued to fall or move sideways, not rise,” Mericle said.

“Won’t stronger growth prevent inflation from falling or even reignite it?” he wrote. “We don’t think so.”

The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal agency, was the first to cite the immigration surge that began in 2022 as the primary factor helping to expand the overall size of the U.S. labor force.

This year, the agency increased its projection of how large the U.S. labor force could be in 2033 by 5.2 million people. Most of that increase is expected to be a result of higher projected net immigration.

The Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, came to a similar conclusion earlier this month, saying the economy can now tolerate a more brisk pace of job growth without adding to cost concerns.

“Faster population and labor force growth has meant that employment could grow more quickly than previously believed without adding to inflationary pressures,” Brookings said.

Wendy Edelberg, a former Federal Reserve economist now serving as director of Brookings’ Hamilton Project, told NBC News the net effect of immigration on inflation is not entirely obvious — but is likely marginal. Indeed, Fed Chair Jay Powell has expressed similar observations, saying the effect of the new wave of arrivals is “broadly neutral.”

What is clear, Edelman said, is that the immigration surge will allow the economy to tolerate higher levels of job growth without overheating.

“Without immigration, if I’d seen an increase of 300,000, I would have been utterly baffled that wages were not higher,” she said, citing the March jobs report released on Friday.

Wage data shows the annual pace of average hourly pay growth has declined to 4.1% in March after hitting a post-pandemic peak of 5.9% in March 2022.

If the supply and demand for labor were truly out of sync, the pace of wage growth would be much higher, likely translating into higher overall inflation.

Instead, thanks to the immigration surge, businesses in the aggregate can tap into the newly growing labor pool to meet continued demand for their goods and services, without having to raise wages significantly to compete for workers.

For many parts of the economy, from federal Social Security payments all the way down to local businesses that may be looking for workers or new customers, immigration is usually a net good, Edelman said.

At the same time, it tends to put a strain on state and local budgets, she said.

Immigration now ranks as the most volatile domestic issue facing President Joe Biden, with Gallup survey respondents ranking it as the country’s “most important problem,” the first time it has held that position since 2019. Republicans have called on Biden to take extreme measures to stem the entry of migrants, while former President Donald Trump has referred to them as “not humans” and “animals.”

Big cities like New York and Chicago, meanwhile, have faced crises stemming in part from political stunts by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that have involved sending migrants to those cities at a pace they’re not equipped to handle.

But while the focus of the debate has been on undocumented immigration, the majority of immigrants arriving are actually authorized to work in the U.S., Edelberg said.

Plus, they’re more likely to spend a greater share of their labor income.

“So they’re increasing the demand for goods and services, and helping to supply labor,” she said. “So the net effect on inflation is actually small.”

Baltimore business owners are bracing for a difficult spring as authorities clear the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, but many are hopeful the worst disruptions will be short-lived.

Alex Del Sordo bought the Hard Yacht Cafe, a more than 30-year-old waterfront restaurant with its own small marina, just 10 days before the Dali, a Singaporean cargo ship, smashed into the bridge on March 26, killing two workers and leaving four others presumed dead.

“We don’t want to fire anybody,” Del Sordo said of his 75 employees Friday. “We want to keep them here — working, happy, healthy.”

Del Sordo has offered first responders 50% off at the cafe over the past week, which has dented his bottom line. His biggest concerns now are “stabilizing costs for our employment and keeping the lights on,” he said.

The restaurant’s marina, usually booked with pleasure boaters, can’t relocate them to accommodate those involved in the bridge response, he added. “We don’t know what to do with all the boats out here on our property. We don’t know where they’re going, how they’re gonna get out of here.”

The Hard Yacht is perched on Bear Creek, a waterway feeding into the Patapsco River, which the Francis Scott Key Bridge had spanned for decades. It’s among the businesses in Baltimore’s historic Dundalk neighborhood that are taking a hit from port disruptions while the cleanup continues. Vessel traffic is currently suspended both into and out of the Port of Baltimore, a spokesperson said, though trucks are still being processed out of the marine terminals.

The Army Corps of Engineers plans to open a 35-foot-deep limited access channel near the wreckage to accommodate barges and smaller commercial ships by the end of this month. A deeper 50-foot channel that allows container ships to pass through is expected to reopen by the end of May. Currently, just two channels less than 15 feet deep are open to vessel traffic, which remains minimal.

Some area businesses liken the fallout to the early days of the pandemic, but many say the upheavals of the last few years have prepared them for a crisis of this magnitude. Even so, key parts of the city’s and region’s economy, from trucking to commercial real estate and local restaurants, rely on the port, which handled a record $80 billion worth of foreign cargo last year.

Michael Clark, president of BTR Logistics, which stores and dispatches cargo through the port, said the lost shipments are “going to impact probably 75% of our revenues in the short term.” Some vessels whose cargo his warehouse would otherwise accept after arriving in Baltimore are being held internationally for now.

“We’re doing everything we can right now to cut costs and stay alive,” Clark said.

Colin Tarbert, president and CEO of the Baltimore Development Corporation, an economic development nonprofit, noted that an estimated 20,000 local jobs are tied directly to the port. A top concern for surrounding businesses is how long it will take for port operations to resume at full capacity, he said.

“The longer the channel is closed, the more exacerbated the issue is,” Tarbert said. While rebuilding the bridge is expected to take years, he voiced confidence that trucks can take existing routes through the city without much business impact. That may be inconvenient, he conceded, but “Baltimore is not closed just because the bridge is closed.”

The U.S. Small Business Administration is rolling out low-interest loans to help local employers survive the next couple of weeks. And on Friday, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed an executive order providing $60 million in relief funding to businesses and workers affected by the bridge collapse. The aid comes on the heels of $60 million that the U.S. Department of Transportation announced last week to support the rebuilding.

Touring the ongoing response effort in Baltimore on Friday, President Joe Biden reiterated his administration’s support for the recovery process. “This is gonna take time,” he said, but he vowed that state and federal authorities would work together to “rebuild this bridge as rapidly as possible.”

In the meantime, Clark said BTR is trying to reroute its incoming cargo shipments, primarily of plywood and steel, to other ports on the East Coast, but getting interstate trucking permits is expensive and time-consuming. The company has applied for an SBA loan but has already had to lay off around a dozen workers.

“Quite frankly, a lot of our customers have made alternative arrangements with different warehouses in different cities,” he said, “and that stuff may never come back through here until we fix this problem.”

The city’s commercial real estate sector doesn’t expect lasting fallout, said Jim Chivers, senior vice president at Gold and Company, a firm serving the Baltimore metro area. “Everyone feels that this is a short-term issue more than a long-term issue,” he said.

Even if some clients retreat, Chivers anticipates plenty of interest in filling vacated properties. “It’s going to be a slow two months, but long-term values I think will continue to remain where they are,” he said. “The heavy demand for industrial real estate is still there in Baltimore.”

The NCAA Women’s Basketball National Championship is set to smash viewership records as star players and greater TV coverage drive more fans than ever to the sport.

The matchup between Iowa and South Carolina, both No. 1 seeds, is slated for 3 p.m. Sunday at the Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse in Cleveland.

Friday night’s matchup between Iowa and No. 3 seed UConn was the most-watched women’s college basketball game ever, and broke ESPN’s record as the most-watched basketball game in the network’s history, college or pro, with 14.2 million viewers and a peak of 17 million.

According to Richard Dietsch, a sportswriter at The Athletic, that’s more than any World Series game last year, any NBA Finals game last year, and every Daytona 500 since 2013.

On Saturday, TickPick said the ‘get-in’ price for Sunday’s women’s final was $555 — a record.

Ratings for Friday night’s women’s semifinals games, which saw Iowa beat UConn and South Carolina top N.C. State, were not available as of Saturday afternoon. 

Soaring interest in the women’s game is the product of two main phenomena, experts say: a new batch of stars, including a once-in-a-generation player; and the increasing coverage those players now receive, thanks to greater investment from networks in broadcasting the games.

At the top of the star wave stands Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa guard who has broken not only the most records for scoring in the women’s game, but earlier this year surpassed Pete Maravich as the all-time leading NCAA career basketball scorer, period. That’s a record that had stood for 54 years.

Clark has been a standout since her arrival at Iowa four years ago, leading the Hawkeyes to the Sweet 16 as a freshman while being unanimously named Big 10 Freshman of the Year and first-team All-Big Ten.

She has gone on to win the NCAA’s most valuable player award the past two years.

At the conclusion of this season, Clark, 22, will leave for the WNBA.

Yet other stars are primed to keep the momentum going for the women’s games, said Ben Portnoy, who covers college sports for Sports Business Journal. While legendary women’s coaches like Tennessee’s Pat Summitt, who died in 2016, and UConn’s Geno Auriemma have been the biggest names in the game, increased — and more consistent — media coverage has led to more players sharing in the spotlight.

In the 2021 season, ESPN and ABC switched to a national broadcast format for the women’s tournament that matched how the mens tournament was televised.

‘Broadcast, over the air coverage, had been lacking,’ said Jon Lewis, who runs Sports Media Watch, a website that tracks athletics broadcasting.

He said ESPN simply took a calculated gamble that there was finally enough demand for the women’s game that keeping it on regional broadcasts or on secondary networks like ESPN 2 was limiting opportunities for growth.

“ESPN’s a business — there’s no charity involved here,” Lewis said. “If they see the women’s Final Four is getting traction on ESPN 2, they started to wonder how many more it could get on ESPN.”

The increased coverage has coincided with a key differentiator that now separates the men’s and women’s games: professional eligibility rules — something that is allowing the women’s game to produce more stars more consistently than the men’s teams.

While women cannot go pro until they turn 22, the age limit is just 19 with one year of college for men.

“The front-line stars in men’s aren’t sticking around as much as in the women’s game,” Portnoy said. “The women’s game benefits from that.”

Among the new crop set to dominate next season’s women’s game: the University of Southern California’s Juju Watkins, Villanova’s Lucy Olsen and Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo.

Portnoy said that as a result of men’s players going pro earlier, there may now be fewer household names in that sport than in women’s. And that’s reflected in some women’s games earning higher ratings this year than men’s games.

But while the men’s game may also increasingly suffer from a lack of stars, there is less structural need for them to get eyeballs, Lewis said. Instead, the lack of some traditional male-dominated powerhouses, like Duke or Kentucky, making it to the final rounds has also kept ratings growth slow this year.

The women’s game is more star-driven, Lewis said.

The end of Clark’s superstar college career could mean this year proves a high watermark for women’s tournament viewership, he said. At the same time, a new viewership floor has been set — and a lesson learned by the networks that the audiences for the women’s game are potentially huge.

‘Between the growth underway before Caitlin Clark, and the growth attributable to Caitlin Clark — I don’t see us going back to the era where it averaged fewer than 3 million viewers,’ Lewis said. ‘So there’s a new permanent higher bar for this tournament going forward.’