The imaginary war on American workers

We're in trouble without more immigration

Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Before President Trump decided to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over the lackluster July jobs report, his administration had been busy trying to put an upbeat spin on its numbers.

Sure, hiring had slowed overall. But employment was roaring for native-born Americans, up almost 2 million jobs this year, officials claimed. This, they argued, was a triumphant reversal of the Biden years, when the borders were being overrun and most of the new work had gone to immigrants.

“Right now we’re seeing American workers are being put first — native-born workers account for all of the job growth and that’s key,” Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told Fox Business. The Department of Homeland Security, not typically one to weigh in on the monthly jobs report, used the occasion to tout its deportation efforts: “As illegal aliens continue to exit the labor force, more Americans are finding steady and gainful employment,” it declared.

There was just one problem: The native-born jobs surge wasn’t real. It was a phantom trend, based on a basic misunderstanding of how the jobs data is gathered and constructed — what the economist Jed Kolko described as a “multiple-count data felony” in a recent Substack post pointing out the error.

Now, it’s not especially shocking that this White House, which produces a daily, Niagara-like cascade of falsehoods, misused some labor market stats. But the implosion of this particular data point should be a death knell for the larger conservative narrative that Biden sacrificed the interests of American-born workers by allowing a wave of mass migration.

In reality, what the Biden years showed — despite the political backlash to immigration — is that the U.S. economy not only can absorb millions more people, but also that it needs to if we’re to have any hope of heading off a vicious spiral of low GDP growth and rising debt we could very well be facing in the years ahead. Immigration isn’t just worth fighting for as a matter of American values: It’s an absolute economic imperative.

But before I make my case for more people, let me explain how the MAGA myth about immigrants in our current job market came to be.

How to commit a "multiple-count data felony"

During the Biden administration, Republicans often tried to downplay the president’s jobs record by arguing that most of the new employment was going to immigrants, especially the asylum seekers who had shown up in unprecedented numbers between 2021 and 2023.

That claim — popularized by the hardline Center for Immigration Studies — was based on the monthly household survey that the BLS uses to calculate the unemployment rate. It showed that over a 12-month period starting in July 2023, the number of native-born workers with a job declined by 1.2 million while the number of foreign-born workers with a job rose by 1.3 million.

If you're at all plugged into right-wing social media — or just followed the Trump campaign's talking points — you'll have seen these figures everywhere.

Now-Vice President JD Vance described the Biden economy as “a war on American citizens” after the monthly jobs report was released in June 2024. Trump incorrectly claimed that “Virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens.” (Foreign-born workers in the household survey include naturalized citizens and people here legally on visas, as well as the undocumented.)

Mainstream economists such as Harvard’s Jason Furman had a simple retort: The employment data was merely showing the telltale signs of an aging population. Native-born workers were getting older as a group and retiring in droves. As a result, their overall labor force numbers were stagnating, while the share of immigrants was growing.

Younger people born in the U.S. weren’t actually having any trouble finding jobs, the economists noted. In 2024, the employment rate for native-born Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 reached its highest crest in about 16 years. They were just filling the gaps left by retirees.

But when Trump came into office and immigration plunged, native-born employment shot up, seemingly validating the zero-sum conservative view of the economy. We were taking those jobs back.

On X, Vance reposted a graph showing that, in the past four months, people born in the U.S. had gained 1.8 million jobs, while foreigners had lost 1.5 million.

“I was told 6 months ago that Americans losing jobs and the foreign-born gaining jobs was an irreversible demographic fact,” Vance wrote. “Turns out you just needed a new president and a new immigration policy.”

All of this was based on a misreading of the government’s statistics. You can’t actually use the household survey to accurately determine how many jobs immigrants or native born Americans are gaining over time, much less whether one group is getting hired faster than the other.

Kolko, who oversaw the Commerce Department’s economic data operations in the Biden administration, explained three reasons why in his Substack post, which he wrote after he and I chatted on the phone (For those interested, there are more technical details in the footnotes):

1. The sample size for immigrants in the survey is relatively small, so even seemingly huge changes in their employment totals could be within the statistical margin of error.¹

2. Second, the household survey is designed to accurately track the unemployment rate over time. But you simply cannot use it to compare total employment levels from year to year, because of quirks in the annual process the BLS uses to update the population figures its numbers are based on. The bureau itself warns about this explicitly.²

3. Finally, and most importantly, the household survey will automatically show an increase in the number of native-born Americans with jobs if responses from immigrants fall for any reason — which is the sort of thing that might be expected to happen if people are suddenly wary about answering strange phone numbers thanks to mass deportations.³

You might ask, “Why is this so complicated? Isn’t there an easier way to tell how U.S.-born workers are doing?” In fact, there is! The BLS reports the unemployment rate for native-born workers and guess what: It's going up. You would expect the opposite if American citizens were suddenly swimming in new opportunities thanks to Trump’s ICE raids.

Ultimately, this fight is about a lot more than a gotcha over data. It actually strikes at the core of what immigration restrictionists believe. Groups like the Center for Immigration Studies have argued that, with lower immigration levels, many more Americans, and particularly men, would enter the labor force. Republicans spent the last several years claiming that a crush of migrants from Central America, Venezuela and the Caribbean were stealing work from U.S. citizens, and that Trump’s efforts to shut the border had led to soaring hiring for natives.

There’s no evidence backing up this story. It’s a conservative fairy tale.⁴

The case for more people

So what was the impact of the historic post-COVID immigration wave? Mostly, it allowed businesses to hire more workers. A lot more. Prior to the pandemic, government forecasters expected that, by 2024, the economy would only be able to sustainably add 60,000 to 100,000 jobs per month. Instead, employers added about 158,000 per month. Crucially, they did it without putting extra pressure on inflation, unlike if they were posting help-wanted ads in a job market with a serious labor shortage. All of this allowed the economy to grow faster than many expected.

More hiring and growth also meant higher tax revenues for the government. Last year, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the immigration surge would likely reduce the deficit by $897 billion over the next decade.

Those numbers, of course, don’t offer a complete picture of the social and political impacts of the immigration burst the U.S. experienced, which was larger than any since at least 1850. The chaos at the border became a political albatross for the Biden administration. The busloads of Venezuelans and Salvadorans brought to New York put a multi-billion-dollar strain on the city’s budget, since it was legally required to house people while they waited for work permits. Homelessness increased nationally. Right-wing media turned a mythical migrant crime wave into a national fixation by spotlighting tragic individual cases like the murder of Laken Riley. We had a fever-dream national debate about whether Haitians were barbecuing cats in Ohio.

And yet: Once we allowed migrants to work, the labor market absorbed them smoothly and there's no evidence it did so by taking opportunities from native workers — as conservatives have insisted. At the risk of recycling an old line, we bumbled our way into a trial run with open-ish borders, and from a purely macroeconomic perspective, it was basically all upside.

Suffice to say, that’s not the main lesson most American politicians appear to be taking away from the immigration story of the last few years. Democrats, with good reason, are still scared shitless of looking too soft on the border after it helped undo Biden, even if Trump’s Gulag-first enforcement philosophy has turned public opinion back against his approach too.

But the hard politics shouldn't blind them to a simple fact: The United States desperately needs more people.

There are ultimately just two ways for a country to grow its economy: It can become more productive — meaning it can get better and more efficient at making things — or it can expand its workforce.

Economists typically prefer to focus on the productivity side of the equation, since it helps raise living standards (the more value each worker creates, the richer we all get on average). But brute force, population growth that keeps your country and workforce younger and growing is critical as well.

Researchers have found evidence that as countries and states get older, their economies expand more slowly, both because fewer workers enter the labor force and productivity growth decelerates. Though the reasons why are not fully understood, there are obvious potential factors: Younger people tend to be more entrepreneurial and more apt to adopt new technologies at the office, which encourages companies to invest in them.

In a similar vein, research has suggested that slowing population growth may lead to fewer new businesses, which drive a great deal of productivity growth and investment. Again, some of that may be due to aging workforces, but there are other practical reasons why that might be the case. After all, a faster-growing population means a bigger market, whether it’s a local coffee shop or a new app.

At the moment, America’s aging demographics are very much working against us. In January, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the U.S. labor force could sustainably grow by around 1% per year through 2027, thanks in part to the Biden immigration boom. But by 2030, the CBO forecasts that the growth rate will fall to 0.5% and by 2035 down to just to 0.3%. As a result, Congress’ number crunchers believe we’ll have difficulty cracking 2% GDP growth.

In theory, we could muddle along with a tepid economy and job market (MAGA!). But thanks to our structural deficits and rising debt load, for the U.S. it could be a recipe for an eventual fiscal crisis.

Nobody has ever successfully identified a specific tipping point where national borrowing becomes an economic drag. But the U.S. is facing escalating interest costs that could eventually eat up much more than we’d like of the economy. We’re also unfortunately teetering around a sort of danger zone, because the interest rates on our new obligations are starting to outstrip our economic growth rate⁵, which mathematically is what puts you on a path to an infinite debt spiral. We’re not facing calamity tomorrow, thankfully — Treasury yields have only been higher than growth for the first half of the year — but it’s also not a road you ever want to end up on. And one of the most straightforward ways to stay off it would be to juice growth. Of course, you could also raise taxes (which I’d personally support) or slash entitlements (which I would not), but growth is the way you deal with debt without sacrifice.

Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are pushing us in the opposite direction. The administration is currently bragging about projections showing its policies could lead to negative net migration — meaning more people may end up leaving the country than entering it in the coming years. A recent report from researchers at the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute found that, if that comes to pass, we’ll only be able to sustainably add between zero and 40,000 jobs a month next year, with lower totals in 2027 and 2028. That compares with earlier government estimates of 50,000 to 90,000 jobs per month.

Looking at the bigger policy picture, the Trump administration seems to be settling on a de facto triumvirate of low taxes (other than the tariffs), low immigration, and no cuts to Medicare or Social Security. It is, ultimately, a fiscally and economically unsustainable combination that only might pencil out if you think that artificial intelligence really is a god machine that’s going to lead to a generational productivity boom. But short of sci-fi turning into full-on reality, we’re currently digging ourselves into a deep hole.

Digging out of it will require more Americans, and more growth.

Of course, many immigration skeptics would agree that we need more population growth in the U.S. — they would just prefer that it come from children born here. I've yet to hear a good argument for how pro-natalist policies will produce children born 18 years ago, but I'm all ears. In a world without time travel, however, it's actually not possible to increase the working-age population without accepting immigrants or making grandma put off retirement until her back finally goes.

Again, I don’t want to downplay how difficult the politics of immigration are. No country has really cracked the code on how to manage high levels of it without some sort of public backlash. Even Canada, which has long prided itself on its multiculturalism, has seen anti-immigrant sentiment escalate in part because of the country’s housing crisis. In the U.S., being seen as lax on the border has cost Democrats dearly with working-class voters who’ve become the party’s Achilles’ heel.

But the fact that it is hard does not take away from one fundamental point: There is no real plan for American economic stability or for a generous welfare state without more immigration. Full stop. Period.

Fixing that will require standing up for openness to immigration as a basic American value while assuring voters that immigration doesn't come hand in hand with chaos. We will write many more pieces about how to do this, but liberals have to own the fact that immigration is a core of America's economic potential and that the populist economic argument against more immigration is a sham.

1. Kolko makes this plain: "The July 2025 estimate of foreign-born employment of 30.8 million has a confidence interval of plus-or-minus 720 thousand. In other words, it’s 95% likely that the true level of foreign-born employment is within a range of over 1.4 million around that 30.8 million estimate."

2. Each year, the Census Bureau revises its population estimates dating back to the decennial census to reflect new information, like births, deaths, and international migration. In January, BLS uses that information to update the total population figures in the household survey for the coming year — but its statisticians don’t revise previous years’ data to match. As a result, you can get a big jump in total employment for individual groups based on a new population forecast, rather than anything that’s actually happening in the job market.

3. The household survey’s total population is preset at the start of the year. However, the BLS determines how many native-born workers and immigrants are in the workforce based on telephone response rates. No matter what, the two numbers combined have to match the overall population figure. So if fewer foreign-born people are answering the phones, that mechanically means that the survey will report higher numbers of native-born Americans.

4. Another data set, the annual American Community Survey, can more accurately track the number of native-born Americans and immigrants who are employed — But that survey publishes at a two-year lag; The most recent edition covers 2023, meaning we won't know for a while what happened this year or last.

5. Specifically, the yields on new, long-term Treasury bonds have lately been higher than our nominal growth rate. The average interest rate on our debt remains below nominal growth, thanks to old debt that will eventually have to be rolled over. It’s theoretically possible that once the Fed starts cutting, it will pull down all of our interest rates low enough to keep us out of the danger zone. But it’s not a guarantee.