"Migrants" aren't taking jobs from working Americans in 2024. Foreign-born replacing Boomers? Maybe

You've probably heard Donald Trump trying to inflame voters when he gives this type of state about the US job market in recent years.

Trump claims that "beyond the number of 100 percent" of job creation has gone to migrants pic.twitter.com/AHFSrwUeSZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 15, 2024

So what is Trump trying to say when he claims “all new jobs have gone to migrants”, and is it BS? CBS Marketwatch looked into it, and the answer is “kind of, but not in the bad way.”

Foreign-born employment is up over the past year, while native-born employment is down, as measured by a Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey. That results in a figure above 100%, which stems from native-born workers retiring as well as a spike in immigration, as MarketWatch’s Steve Goldstein noted in posts on social media.

However, the term “migrants” is not typically used interchangeably with “foreign-born workers.”

The first term can conjure up images of people who recently crossed the southern U.S. border illegally and are working in construction or on farms, though it can cover migrant workers in white-collar jobs. The second term applies to undocumented immigrants as well, but also to naturalized U.S. citizens who have lived in the country for years — in some cases for decades, and in some cases since childhood. An Associated Press report made the same point, saying that “foreign born” is not the same as “migrant.”

About half, according to a recent estimate from Standard Chartered economists Steve Englander and Dan Pan. They offered that estimate in a note dated May 30 as they looked at data covering the federal government’s current fiscal year, which started Oct. 1.

The closely watched monthly U.S. jobs reports might look “moderate” or “hardly boom time” if undocumented workers were not counted in them, the economists wrote. Federal Reserve officials who determine interest rates “might be less hawkish if the impact of undocumented immigrants on [the jobs reports] was well estimated and understood,” the Standard Chartered team added.

Here's Goldstein's tweets on those stats.

Data: https://t.co/QKGytrtkWr

In spreadsheet form pic.twitter.com/ojnEdDEwBj

— Steve Goldstein (@MKTWgoldstein) August 16, 2024

There could be an argument that there’s a bit of a dampening in wages due to the increased immigration, but we also likely wouldn’t see nearly as many people working in America in general (both among the foreign born as well as those born in the US). And as the Congressional Budget Office recently noted, the wave of immigration from 2021-2023 should raise the US’s economic output for future years, and reduce its budget deficit.

In addition, America has had a nearly equal amount of births vs deaths in the 2020s, and 2022-2024 are the peak years for Baby Boomers turning 65. So we'd have real capacity problems in this country if it wasn't for more immigration, and likely we'd have seen more shortages and inflation than we had in the post-COVID supply crunch that first jumped prices in 2021.

Let's also point out that the percentage of working-age people in America that have jobs is staying at or above the pre-COVID highs of 80.6%. The only time this number was bigger was at the end of the Dot-com Boom in early 2000, which was also when the first Boomers were 54 and aging out of this stat. So it's not like there are many Americans that have had career opportunities being taken away during the 2021-2023 immigration surge.

Sure, maybe more of those people working between ages 25-54 are foreign-born compared to prior years, but
1. That doesn't mean they're not American citizens, and
2. Even if some of them are not citizens, many immigrants pay into Social Security and Medicare, and almost all take part in transactions in the States outside of work that add to the overall economy.

What is likely is that while the number of native-born Americans in jobs has been stagnant in the last year, that doesn't mean Americans have lost jobs to the foreign born, as it is likely a reflection of younger workers born in America and in other countries that are replacing native-born Boomer-aged retirees. But like a lot of other things in Trump/MAGA world, they mash a couple of mostly-unrelated stats together to create a story that sounds right to them, regardless of whether that matches reality.

But you don't have to be weak, straw-graspers like those SUCKERS. Know that the increase in immigration in the early 2020s has helped the US economy recover faster than almost any other industrialized country from the wreck of the COVID pandemic. And even if you think there needs to be limits on immigration and safeguards on who is coming into the country (as most sensible people do in America), know that Donald Trump and the GOP are the only ones that stopped significant reforms in immigration policy from happening in 2024.