Corporate America is fixated on the wrong headline risk. While boardrooms debate model updates and AI guardrails, the more immediate threat is hiding in plain sight: the quiet hollowing out of the workforce—and the middle class that underwrites it. In just three months of 2025, 1.147 million foreign-born workers disappeared from the U.S. labor force, nearly a third of them foreign-born women. Over the same quarter, nearly 300,000 Black women were pushed out of the workforce. Those aren’t statistical blips; they’re structural alarms.

Look under the surface, and the picture sharpens. Black women’s labor force participation fell 2 percentage points in three months—a swing so abrupt that it took 16 years for prime-age women’s participation overall to fall just 4 points. Meanwhile, foreign

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