Data: Foreign Workers See 4X the Job Growth of Americans in January

Foreign-born workers are continuing to make significant employment gains over native-born American workers, the latest federal job data reveals.

For the month of January, foreign-born workers increased their labor participation rate year-to-year nearly nine times as much as native-born Americans. Likewise, foreign workers enjoyed nearly four times the job growth in January as American workers. While the foreign worker population increased about 3.4 percent year-to-year, the American worker population increased less than 0.9 percent over the same period.

Even in unemployment data, foreign-born workers are vastly outpacing American workers.

For January, foreign-born workers saw their unemployment rate drop 4.46 percent compared to this time last year. For native-born American workers, the unemployment rated dropped, but at a much slower pace, with a year-to-year decrease of about 2.22 percent.

Though President Trump campaigned to decrease overall illegal and legal immigration to the U.S., regulatory curbs to immigration laws have not actually reduced the number of legal immigrants arriving in the country every year. About 1.5 million foreign nationals arrive in the U.S. annually, as well as the 1.5 million foreign workers occupying high-paying, white-collar American jobs at any given time.

In December, November, October, and September of last year, foreign-born workers continuously made larger gains over American citizens in monthly employment and unemployment totals.

While legal immigrants continued being admitted to the U.S. to take blue-collar working-class jobs and many white-collar, high-paying jobs, there remains 6.5 million Americans who are unemployed, 12.9 percent of whom are teenagers, and 6.8 percent of whom are black Americans.

Overall, about remain about 1.3 million U.S. workers have been jobless for at least 27 weeks, accounting for about 19 percent of the unemployed population. Roughly 5.1 million workers are working part-time but want full-time jobs, and 1.6 million workers want a job, including 426,000 workers who are discouraged by their job prospects.