Buried deep within an otherwise routine state employment report for December is a troubling mystery. Colorado is starting to see an alarmingly large number of workers go missing.

Colorado’s labor force shrank 0.6% year-over-year last month, a monthly decline matching the pace seen during the Great Recession. After flatlining in August, the labor force, those working or looking for work, has been retreating since September. For the year, 20,280 people vanished from its ranks, mostly in the fourth quarter.

That has never happened outside a severe recession or economic shock like the COVID-19 pandemic.

From April 2020 to March 2021, workers removed themselves from the labor force in record numbers. Giving up a paycheck to avoid landing on a respirator seemed like a fair trade-off to many older workers during the pandemic. The defections were unprecedented, triggering a 3.4% drop in the labor force in July 2020. But they were short-lived. People returned once restrictions eased and vaccines became available.

Another 12-month stretch of a draining labor pool occurred from September 2009 to August 2010 during the housing crash and Great Recession. People couldn’t easily replace the jobs they lost. Many gave up trying. That contributed to annual declines of 0.7% and 0.6% during the worst months.

The mother of all Colorado labor force deflations happened from July 1985 to June 1989. It started during a severe oil and gas downturn, which was followed by a lending crisis, which was followed by a collapse in commercial real estate and home values. It was such an ugly period economically that companies and people packed their bags and left the state in droves.

The year-over-year drops reached a high of 0.9% and 0.8% in 1989, but most months ran lower, with some positive months mixed in. But all those Colorado natives kept graduating from high school and college. The unemployment rose to as high as 8.4% in December 1985 and January 1986. The workers who stayed gutted it out. Better times returned in the 1990s.

There is no health crisis keeping people home, no recession triggering major layoffs and no collapse in a pillar of the state economy. So what might be driving the decline in the number of workers?

The easy out is to blame statistical noise. The household survey — used to determine the size of the labor force and the unemployment rate — is subject to revisions. The federal government shutdown in October might have mucked things up. Below-average snowfalls might have reduced demand for resort workers. The list goes on.

But the decline is large and accelerating, and it started before the shutdown. It likely reflects a real shift, said Brian Lewandowski, executive director of the Business Research Division at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“I think the current softening could be a mixture of both the market (demographics) and policy,” he said.

One demographic piece involves more workers retiring. The mirror doesn’t lie. Colorado’s population is getting older. The long-predicted silver tsunami may finally be sucking workers out of the labor pool. But aging is a slow-moving trend, not akin to an earthquake.

Migration is a more plausible force behind what is happening. Colorado lost 12,100 more people than it gained from other states in the year through June 30, according to a population update Tuesday from the U.S. Census Bureau.

That trend may have accelerated in the second half of the year based on what is happening to the labor force. Colorado’s net domestic migration is down sharply since the pandemic. Blame higher housing costs and fewer job opportunities. More longtime residents appear to be picking up and moving out. Last year, Colorado became one of five states with significantly more outbound than inbound moves, according to a survey by United Van Lines.

From the reopening of the economy following the pandemic through 2024, Colorado saw big increases in the number of people arriving from other countries. Migration to Colorado historically has been 80% domestic and 20% international. That ratio flipped this decade, according to the State Demography Office.

In the 12 months through June 30, the state’s net international migration of 15,356 was enough to offset the loss of 12,100 domestically last year. The combined number was weak, but it wasn’t negative. For the last several years, it appears international migration helped mask the weakness the state was facing on the domestic side.

And the mask has been removed. This is where policy shock comes into play.

Voters, upset with the immigration surge and inflation, elected Donald Trump to office. His administration has moved quickly to shut down flows across the border and remove illegal immigrants. The administration has also tightened down on legal channels of immigration, requiring more vetting and in-person interviews, delaying application processing and even reversing earlier green card approvals.

“The slowdown in U.S. population growth is largely due to a historic decline in net international migration, which dropped from 2.7 million to 1.3 million in the period from July 2024 through June 2025,” said Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for Estimates and Projections at the Census Bureau, in a news release Tuesday. “With births and deaths remaining relatively stable compared to the prior year, the sharp decline in net international migration is the main reason for the slower growth rate we see today.”

Lewandowski notes that the labor force shrank in a dozen states in December, and 19 states had growth rates below 1%. Wyoming led the country on the downside with a 2.5% decline. Vermont and Wisconsin also dropped more than 2%. Illinois, Virginia and Connecticut had declines above 1%.

“I certainly think the lack of international migration has to be playing a role as we don’t have replacements,” said Richard Wobbekind, a senior economist with the Business Research Division, of the shrinking labor force.

More older workers are retiring each year. Years of a subdued birth rate mean fewer young adults are entering the workforce. Colorado has become less attractive to young adults living in other states, and with each passing year, there are fewer of them to recruit. Now immigration has been throttled.

That may explain why the state’s unemployment rate has managed to drop significantly despite fairly weak job growth. It fell from 4.6% a year ago to 3.8%. Normally, a falling unemployment rate is associated with a strong job market. But job gains are a little over a third of their historical pace since 1990. The last two years have been the weakest outside of a recession.

Over the past year, nonfarm payrolls increased by 23,000, with 18,900 of those jobs coming in the private sector and governments adding 4,100 jobs, according to the December employment report from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.

The two-lined spittlebug arrived on Hawaii island in 2016.

The tiny black bug is about one centimeter long with two blood-orange stripes across its body and red legs. It’s a leaf hopper that feeds on grass through its entire life cycle, which is typically around 60 days.

Now, 10 years later, it has destroyed an estimated 320,000 acres of ranchlands from Pu‘u Wa‘awa‘a to South Point.

“It has grown tremendously,” said Mark Thorne, a range and livestock extension specialist with the University of
Hawaii.

Thorne has led research on the pest’s impact on the island since its arrival. He said if nothing is done and the pest moves north into Waimea, where the state’s largest livestock production resides, “we stand to potentially lose our best cattle production ranchlands and that entire industry.”

The threat to the cattle industry prompted Sen. Mike Gabbard, D Kapolei-Makakilo-­Kalaeloa, to introduce SB 2321, which would create a two-year response pilot program within the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity to address the spittlebug on the Big Island. The bill passed its first reading on Jan. 21 and was referred to the Agriculture and Environment and Ways and Means committees on Jan. 26.

“This bill is really about getting ahead of the problem,” Gabbard said in an email. “Not just reacting once the damage is already done.”

As of 2023, the bill said, the state’s livestock industry had a production value of more than $50 million with more than 143,000 beef cattle. Most of that cattle is raised on Hawaii island
and 70% of them feed on sod-farming grasses, such as kikuyo and pangola, which the spittlebug targets.

The bug is native to the southeast United States, said Nicole Galase, managing director for Hawaii Cattlemen’s Council. She said she helped lobby for the bill, which aims to help ranchers who are “shelling out hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to battle this bug on their own” stay in business while ensuring best practices are taking place to prevent the infestation from spreading.

“It’s not something that just ranchers alone can combat,” she said. “The fact is the ranchers are on the front line of having to deal with it, but eventually we are worried that it could be affecting any area with grass cover.”

When the spittlebug kills pasture grass, it clears the way for invasive grasses and weeds to move in, Thorne said. Those invasive grasses and weeds are incredibly
difficult for ranchers to
remove.

“It basically renders the rangelands that our livestock industry rely on almost to the point of not being able to support livestock production,” Thorne said. “It’s pretty devastating.”

So far, the infestation has been able to stay concentrated in the south Kona area, Thorne said, but a new population was recently discovered in Glenwood likely due to inadvertent human transportation.

Thorne said a response team could help educate ranchers about the bug and its impact so that they can implement quick responses as soon as they notice a dead patch of grass or spittlebug masses in the soil.

The bug is difficult to spot because of its small size and proximity to the soil line for the majority of its life cycle. Eggs are laid in soil and when they hatch, tiny nymphs excrete white froth known as “spittle mass” that protect them from predators and drying out. Adults can be seen hopping around the pasture for the final three to four weeks of their life.

As of now, Thorne said the best way to contain the pest is to target them while they are in the nymph stage by cutting the grass short and spraying pesticide after finding a patch of dying grass. He also advised ranchers to ensure mud is cleaned from equipment, shoes and cars.

A mobile phone application was also created by Thorne’s team to help the public identify and report the pest. The app can be downloaded at tlsbhawaii.com.

Franny Brewer, program manager for the Big Island Invasive Species Committee, said a key infrastructure need that is sometimes overlooked is a way for ranchers to store grass seed. Ranchers have a limited time to reseed land after grass is destroyed, she said, and timing that with shipping seed from the mainland has been a challenge.

“There’s no secure facility that has the right environmental conditions on this island where there could be a place where seed is stored so we could buy bulk seed and have it ready to distribute to the ranchers,” she said. “Just even that infrastructure would be huge.”

Brewer supported the bill but emphasized the need for a clear plan from the
department.

She added that the bug will not only have negative effects on the cattle industry and Hawaii’s food security, but also can impact Hawaii’s watersheds through soil erosion.

“It’s really important for any invasive species to have a plan early, and have steps that you can implement,” she said. “If you don’t have
a plan and you’re just getting funding willy-nilly, is that going to contribute
long term to the success
of the response?”

Stacey Chun, an entomologist for the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity in Hilo, said the agency needs more funding to do more research on mitigation strategies on the pest.

“The cattle industry is a $50 million industry,” he said. “We need all the support we can get for it. There are jobs and lifestyles affected and we need to help keep the local economy
going.”

Gabbard said if passed, the pilot response team will target early infestations, map the big’s spread and test most effective and affordable ways to control it. It will also allow support and reimbursement for ranchers to ensure they “aren’t left to shoulder the cost alone,” Gabbard said.

The program would need an estimated
$1.6 million to operation — $800,000 for each year — Gabbard said. He noted that the coconut rhinoceros beetle, which has decimated Oahu’s palm trees, showed what happens when invasive species outpace a coordinated response: containment becomes more expensive and less effective.

Gabbard emphasized that every dollar spent now will save more money down the line as the state works to stop the spread of bug.

“If we wait until this pest spreads across more islands and more ranchlands,” Gabbard said, “the cost to the state — in emergency response, lost agricultural production and higher food prices — will be far greater than what it takes to fund this pilot program and do it right the first time.”