Former president Donald Trump wrote in an August 20 post on Truth Social that “most new jobs under Biden went to illegal immigrants.” Predictably, “fact checkers” attacked his assertion. It is the case that a significant share of job growth went to the native-born in 2021 as the economy recovered from Covid. But Trump is probably right if we focus on the past two years. Furthermore, the current low unemployment rate does not include the millions of working-age Americans who have dropped out of the labor force entirely. The massive influx of foreign workers in recent decades allows us to ignore these Americans and the enormous social problems this situation creates.
The government’s Current Population Survey (CPS) asks members of the general public each month whether they are working, looking for work (unemployed), or neither working nor looking for work. That last category is referred to as “not in the labor force.”
The CPS collects a wide array of demographic information, including citizenship and country of birth, along with age, race, sex, education level, and occupation. The foreign-born, often colloquially called “immigrants,” are all those who were not American citizens at birth — including naturalized citizens, permanent residents (green-card holders), temporary visitors (mostly guest workers and foreign students), and illegal immigrants. The Census Bureau, which collects the CPS, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which analyzes the data each month, are both clear that illegal immigrants are included in the data.
In a series of reports, we have chronicled the dramatic growth of the foreign-born in the monthly CPS since President Biden took office. It is possible that some of the growth in 2021 is overstated owing to problems with collecting the survey during the pandemic. However, between July 2022 and July 2024, the total foreign-born in the CPS increased by 3.9 million, and there can be little doubt that the observed increase is real.
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