The Native-Born Jobs Boom Was a Mirage

An estimated 130,985,000 native-born Americans had jobs in February, according to the employment report released Friday. That’s 128,000 more than in the month a year earlier — the best comparison because these numbers aren’t adjusted for seasonal employment patterns — a 0.1% increase. That is better than nothing but a far cry from the huge gains in native-born employment that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting last year and that the White House was trumpeting as evidence of the success of its immigration policies.

I argued a couple of times last year that the native-born jobs boom was a statistical mirage, so in some sense it’s nice to see my suppositions confirmed. But it’s also a dispiriting indication that the Trump administration’s deportation campaign doesn’t seem to have left anybody better off, at least not yet. The unemployment rate has continued to rise for native-born Americans, and while it’s down somewhat for immigrants over the past year, that’s partly because there are fewer of them (I use 12-month averages because the monthly numbers, which aren’t seasonally adjusted, are too noisy to make sense of).