EN
FR
by
A viral chart showing an increase in employment among native-born Americans is a multiple-count data felony.
Following recent monthly jobs reports, officials in Donald Trump’s administration and their supporters have highlighted a remarkable increase in native-born employment. The Vice President, the Secretary of Labor, and the new nominee for Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner have all recently announced that there are two million more employed native-born Americans than a year ago.
It’s not just administration cheerleaders: Respected economists on the center-left and center-right have also charted and commented on these trends in native-born and foreign-born employment. And no wonder: immigration is a contentious topic that directly affects the economy. (Note: these figures are readily accessible in the monthly jobs report, and the historical series of native-born employment and foreign-born employment are easily downloadable on the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) site.)
However, agencies caution that these data are unsuitable for estimating and analyzing trends in the foreign-born and native-born populations. In fact, the “boom” in native-born employment is merely a statistical illusion caused by complex rules in how the data are compiled and population figures are calculated.
The best way to gauge how native-born Americans are doing is to look at their unemployment rate. The native-born unemployment rate has gone up over the past year, while the foreign-born unemployment rate hasn’t.
Before getting into the technical details, let’s pause to ask whether the supposed foreign-born and native-born employment trends pass the sniff test. The Current Population Survey (CPS) shows that the foreign-born population dropped by 2.2 million from January to July, and foreign-born employment by 1 million. That’s far different than a recent estimate by leading researchers that full-year 2025 net immigration could range from +115 thousand to -525 thousand. Furthermore, the CPS reports that the native-born adult population rose by 3 million from January to July, and native-born employment was up 2.5 million in those six months. How is that possible when population growth excluding immigration is typically over half a million annually? Was there a baby boom 16 years ago, now entering the workforce? Or a medical innovation that prevented any deaths this year? A moment’s thought says these swings are implausible.
Admittedly, the Center for Immigration Studies, which has reported on some of these trends, correctly notes that the “CPS is the only up-to-date public data source that allows for analysis of the total foreign-born population.” However, even though CPS can be used to estimate the size of the foreign-born and native-born populations, it is not designed for that purpose, and you shouldn’t attempt it. Here’s why.
There are three reasons why the CPS should not be used to estimate the population or employment of the native-born or foreign-born.
First, the CPS has a small sample size. For example, the July 2025 estimate of foreign-born employment at 30.8 million has a “confidence interval” of plus or minus 720 thousand. In other words, there’s a 95 percent chance that foreign-born employment falls within a range of over 1.4 million around that 30.8 million estimate. That’s huge! Total annual immigration to the U.S. is usually less than that confidence interval. Unsurprisingly, the Census Bureau “routinely cautions against” using the CPS to estimate the foreign-born population.
The second reason is more technical—and damning: the annual CPS population adjustment. The CPS updates the survey each January to match the latest Census population estimates. The total population reported in the CPS sometimes jumps significantly up or down. In January 2025, the adjustment was substantial, adding 3.5 million people overall, which increased the number of adults by 2.9 million, employed people by 2.0 million, and native-born employed people by 1.2 million.
Historical CPS data are not revised. Table A-7 of the July jobs report shows a 2 million increase in native-born employment between July 2024 and July 2025, but 1.2 million of that increase—more than half—is due to the population adjustment in January 2025. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.
The third reason is the most important. Census population estimates serve as the “population controls” for the CPS. That means the total population reported each month in 2025 in the CPS equals the monthly population projections that the Census calculated in late 2024. These population controls predetermine not just the total population but also the population by age, sex, and race & ethnicity. That means we also already know that the CPS will report that there are, for instance, 5,308,938 Hispanic/Latino men age 25-34 in October 2025.
In contrast, the native-born and foreign-born populations are not set by Census estimates. Instead, nativity (whether someone was born in the U.S. or elsewhere) depends on survey responses. However, the native-born and foreign-born populations must sum to the predetermined totals for the population and demographic groups, known as “population controls.” If foreign-born responses decrease for any reason, the survey’s sampling and weighting procedures will adjust the native-born population so that the total matches the population controls.
Imagine an extreme thought experiment: suppose the entire foreign-born U.S. population vanished at the end of July: Tens of millions of people gone. What would that look like in the CPS? The reported foreign-born population would drop to zero. But because the total population is predetermined, the reported native-born population would swell to equal the predetermined population controls through sampling and weighting procedures.
It’s plausible, though unverifiable, that the foreign-born population, as reported by the CPS, has fallen by some amount because of some mix of less immigration, more deportations, and declining survey response rates among fearful immigrants. That would cause the reported native-born population in the CPS to rise.
If the foreign-born population decreases or their response rate declines, the reported native-born population would naturally appear larger in demographic categories with a higher proportion of immigrants. We should observe a greater increase in the reported native-born population among Hispanic/Latino men aged 25-34—a group with a high share of immigrants—compared to, for example, White women aged 65-74, a predominantly native-born group.
Let’s examine the numbers. CPS reported that the native-born adult population increased from 222,243 thousand in January 2025 to 225,276 thousand in July 2025, a rise of 3 million people or 1.4 percent. This growth was disproportionately focused in demographic groups with a high share of non-citizen immigrants who are likely more hesitant to respond to surveys: Hispanics/Latinos aged 25 to 64 and Asian-Americans aged 25 to 44. (Older Asian immigrants are more likely to be naturalized citizens.) Analyzing CPS microdata, the native-born population in these high-immigrant demographic groups grew an implausibly high 5.9 percent between January and July, while the native-born population in all other groups increased by only 0.9 percent over the same period—a sixfold difference.
One hypothesis about the decline in the foreign-born population and the increase in the native-born population doesn’t hold up: respondents aren’t changing their self-reported nativity status from foreign to native across the months they respond to the survey. In 2025, just 0.1 percent of respondents who said in their final month in the survey that they were native-born had responded in any previous month that they were foreign-born. This small share of respondents who switched from being foreign-born to claiming they were native-born is tiny compared to the reported growth in the native-born population.
Therefore, the reported rise in the native-born population—year over year or since January—is due to population adjustment and population controls used in the CPS. The sharp decline in the foreign-born population is suspiciously large; the reality is likely a combination of a slowly growing or possibly slightly shrinking foreign-born population, along with decreasing response rates among foreign-born respondents. However, the significant jump in the native-born population is an artifact of survey sampling and weighting. It provides no real insight into the actual native-born American population, employment figures, or labor-market experience.
Here’s What We DO Know about Immigration and Nativity from the Jobs Report
Luckily, the jobs report shows how native-born and foreign-born people are doing in the labor market. For the foreign-born, unemployment was 4.1 percent in July 2025, down from 4.7 percent in July 2024. For the native-born, it was 4.7 percent in July 2025, slightly higher than 4.5 percent in July 2024.
Like everything in the CPS, the unemployment rate is based on a small sample, so it’s always good to average over several months to smooth out volatility and compare the same months in previous years to eliminate seasonal patterns. Comparing the six-month average from February to July 2025 with that of February to July 2024: the foreign-born unemployment rate was 4.1 percent in both years, and the native-born unemployment rate increased from 4.0 percent in 2024 to 4.3 percent in 2025. Native-born workers are faring worse in the labor market this year than they did last year, before the end of the immigration surge in summer 2024.
But what about those new 2 million employed native-born Americans in the past year? Look at that table again. The 2 million increase in native-born employment represents a 1.5 percent rise. However, the number of unemployed native-born Americans grew at a faster rate, by 6.1 percent. When quirks in the CPS population adjustment and population controls methods inflate the population for groups like the native-born, they inflate everything: not just the number employed but also the number unemployed and not in the labor force.
The unemployment rate is the most reliable information the CPS provides about both native- and foreign-born populations. Ignore population and employment levels: they can be misleading.
The other part of the jobs report—the payroll survey—provides a different perspective on how immigration influences the labor market. Employers are not asked about the citizenship or birthplace of their workers, but industries vary greatly in how many of their employees are immigrants. Using an algorithm developed by economist George Borjas, I estimated the share of unauthorized immigrants in different industries based on American Community Survey data and compared the monthly job growth in high unauthorized-immigrant industries with that in the rest of the private sector.
Job growth in high-unauthorized-immigrant industries started lagging other industries after the immigration surge ended in mid-2024 and has been flat since the start of 2025. Job growth in other industries has also slowed, but less so. The end of the immigration surge coincided with a slowdown in the immigrant workforce and the growth rate of industries that rely more on immigrants.
If Charting Native-Born Employment Levels Is a Crime, Are the Statistical Agencies Accomplices?
No. The Census warns against using the CPS to estimate the size of the foreign-born and native-born populations, and BLS discourages users from comparing data across years. Ignore their warnings at your peril.
Source: https://washingtonmonthly.com
Your Tax Free Donations Are Appreciated and Help Fund our Volunteer Website
Disclaimer: We at Prepare for Change (PFC) bring you information that is not offered by the mainstream news, and therefore may seem controversial. The opinions, views, statements, and/or information we present are not necessarily promoted, endorsed, espoused, or agreed to by Prepare for Change, its leadership Council, members, those who work with PFC, or those who read its content. However, they are hopefully provocative. Please use discernment! Use logical thinking, your own intuition and your own connection with Source, Spirit and Natural Laws to help you determine what is true and what is not. By sharing information and seeding dialogue, it is our goal to raise consciousness and awareness of higher truths to free us from enslavement of the matrix in this material realm.
