WASHINGTON – Reeling from a jobs report showing the first monthly decline in employment since 2020, the Donald Trump administration scrambled Friday to find something good about the latest numbers.
Though overall job growth may be weak, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer took solace in the hope that immigrants may have missed out entirely.
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“All job growth this year has been in the private sector among native-born Americans,” Chavez-Deremer said in a statement.
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The unemployment rate rose a tenth of a percentage point to 4.3% in August, the department said Friday, as employers added a weaker-than-expected 22,000 jobs. Revisions to the prior two months showed employers actually cut 13,000 jobs in June, the first monthly job loss since the coronavirus pandemic in April 2020.
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The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that as of August, there were 132.4 million native-born workers, up from 130.5 million in January, while foreign-born employment declined from 31.7 million to 30.8 million.
The Trump administration has previously highlighted the employment-by-nativity data as evidence that the president’s mass deportation scheme is benefiting American workers, since the administration has apprehended thousands of immigrants and virtually halted illegal border crossings. It’s plausible there would be fewer foreign-born workers as a result.
The foreign-born numbers can be misleading, however, because they are derived from monthly survey data that can be unreliable and is subject to an annual “benchmark” revision based on more precise census figures. And it’s unlikely the native-born population increased by 2 million in less than a year considering annual population growth trends closer to half a million.
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Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former undersecretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce, on Friday called the nativity numbers “meaningless.” He pointed out that from July to August, the same data series shows a huge 561,000 drop in native-born employment and a 50,000 increase in foreign-born employment. Kolko has said it’s better to look instead at unemployment rates for the two categories, both of which increased in August.
“It is very clear that job growth is slowing primarily because there’s been a big slowdown in immigration,” Kolko told HuffPost. “We saw another month of job losses in durable goods manufacturing, so tariffs may be adding to the slowdown also.”
The Trump administration found other ways to spin the unfavorable jobs report.
Kevin Hassett, director of the president’s National Economic Council, said the August jobs number would be revised upward in the coming months.
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“If you get the typical revision for August, which is about 60,000, then the jobs number would be about consistent with the other indicators that we’re seeing,” Hassett told reporters Friday. “We’re highly confident with the trend that native-born workers are replacing the illegal workers.”
Speaking before the jobs report came out on Friday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested the numbers would eventually improve as a result of the president firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in response to last month’s bad jobs report.
“I think they’ll get better because you’ll take out the people who are just trying to create noise against the president,” Lutnick said on CNBC. “The employment situation in America is going to be so impressive.”
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