Key Takeaways
- Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a large increase in the number of native-born U.S. workers, and a decrease in those who are foreign-born.
- White House officials pointed to the data as vindicating President Donald Trump’s “America First” economic policies.
- Economists said the shift was more likely related to statistical quirks and did not represent genuine gains for U.S.-born workers.
Since President Donald Trump took office, data shows native-born Americans have gained millions of jobs, while foreign-born workers have lost them. Is the shift a vindication of the president’s “America First” policies, or just a statistical mirage?
Since January, the U.S. economy has added nearly 2.5 million native-born workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time, the foreign-born workforce has shrunk by 1 million.
There are at least three competing explanations for why this has happened.
America Has Been Made Great Again
Officials in the Trump administration have pointed to the shift as evidence of the success of Trump’s economic policies. Trump has launched a campaign of mass deportation, removing unauthorized immigrants from the country and cracking down on immigrants coming over the border from Mexico, aiming to increase jobs available to U.S.-born workers.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer in July on Fox News pointed to the BLS data as evidence the policies were working.
“The promises made by the President were that he was going to pay attention to the American worker, and that’s why you’re seeing American-born jobs increase,” she said.
The rise in U.S.-born workers has been a bright spot for the White House amid other data showing a sharp slowdown in overall job growth.
People Are Changing Their Answers On Surveys
Several economists were skeptical that the data showed much of a genuine shift toward native-born workers.
Jonathan Pingle and Alan Detmeister, economists for UBS, said the data were rooted in the fact that the BLS figures are compiled from household surveys.
In an analysis this month, Pingle noted the same set of economic data showed the overall native-born population of people over 16 suddenly, and improbably, rose by millions.
“Where did we find 3 million more people born 16 or more years ago in the United States in just seven months?” Pingle wrote in a commentary. “Overall population growth in that time has been only 1.1 million. Clearly, creating people out of thin air or giving birth to 16-year-olds is implausible.”
Pingle theorized that some people surveyed by the BLS have changed their self-reported status to native-born from foreign-born. That could be an understandable shift amid Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“If households that previously reported themselves as foreign-born are now reporting themselves as native-born, that means comparing statistics based on the two classifications is not comparable over time,” he wrote.
It’s Just A Statistical Fluke
There’s a third explanation that doesn’t involve people lying on government surveys.
Jed Kolko, an economist and economic advisor to former President Joe Biden, said the answer was likely a statistical fluke related to how the BLS calculates its workforce statistics.
The reasons are complicated, but in short, they involve the fact that the bureau adjusts its figures in relation to data from the Census Bureau on the size of the total U.S. population. This can result in sudden lurches in native-born and foreign-born job levels, making it impossible to compare them accurately over time.
“The decline in the foreign-born population is suspiciously large; the truth is probably a combination of a slowly growing or possibly slightly declining foreign-born population, combined with declining response rates for the foreign-born,” Kolko wrote in a blog post. “But the huge jump in the native-born population is an artifact of survey sampling and weighting. It tells us nothing about the true population, employment, or labor-market experience of native-born Americans.”
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