The foreign-born share of the U.S. workforce is slightly declining as President Donald Trump’s “Hire American” economy pulls millions of sidelined Americans into jobs.
This gain for all American employees was revealed in the January 10 jobs report that showed the number of employed Americans rose in the last twelve months, while the number of foreign-born people in jobs declined during the same period.
The number of Americans earning wages rose by 1.23 million, up to 135.9 million, during the last twelve months, said the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The number of foreign-born workers — legal immigrants, illegals, and visa workers — in U.S. jobs fell from 27.4 million to 27.2 million. That is a drop of 170,000 during the same period.
The data may be modestly skewed by incomplete counts, but the trend is that Americans are gaining a larger share of jobs amid the continued inflow of migrants, said Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies. He said:
There does seem to be some evidence that Americans are making significant gains [even] as the level of immigration … has not accelerated. It looks like maybe Trump’s policies of reducing refugees, cracking down on illegal migration, and increased vetting of green cards [for new legal migrants], …. may have resulted in native[-born Americans] making gains — that is a reasonable interpretation of data.
Routine deaths and departures can partly explain the migrant reduction, he said. But the data also seems to undercount the flow of migrants who came through the Mexican border in 2019, he added.
Yet the data marks a change from the pro-migrant policies pushed by President Barack Obama.
In the six Obama years from December 2010 to December 2016, 3.73 million foreigners got jobs, even as Americans gained 8.91 million jobs as the country slowly pulled out of the depths of the Great Recession.
In the two Trump years from December 2017 to December 2019, migrants gained 1.13 million jobs, while Americans gained 3.77 million jobs.
Under Obama, five Americans got jobs for every two jobs gained by legal or illegal migrants.
Under Trump, seven Americans got jobs for every two jobs gained by legal or illegal migrants.
The data shows a win for the America-first policies got Trump elected in 2016.
The numbers are also a win for Ivanka Trump’s campaign to make U.S. companies train more Americans for many jobs that companies would prefer to fill with cheaper migrants. On January 7, she told an industry convention:
When I hear employers [who] would come to me and they’d say, ‘We need more skilled workers, we need more skilled workers,’ and then I’d read about them laying off segments of their [American] workforce because they were investing in productivity, and not having spent the time — when they had known three years prior they’d be making that investment and upgrading those systems — not taking the time to take those workers and reskill and then retrain them into their job vacancies, well, I have very little sympathy for that.
In contrast, many Democrats want the federal government to help more illegals and more legal migrants get into the U.S. workforce – despite the damage to Americans’ wages, housing prices, and K-12 schools:
Amid the small gain for Americans under Trump, the rush of legal migrants into the United States continues, at a pace of roughly one million migrants for every four million Americans who turn 18.
For example, the number of migrants in the U.S. workforce rose by 28 percent between 2009 and 2019, while the number of working Americans rose by just 12.5 percent.
Migrants comprised 15.4 percent of the workforce in December 2009, and they comprised 17.2 percent in December 2019. That shows their growth from one-in-seven of the workforce in 2009 to one-in-six of the workforce in 2019. That massive supply of outside workers helps to hold down wages and salaries for many Americans.
Also, Trump is under a lot of pressure from business groups to open up the migration spigot during his second term.
“I have so many companies coming into this country, you’re not going to have to worry about it,” Trump said on Fox News on January 10, adding, “It is always going to be a shortage … We have so many companies coming in from Japan … [and] China now is going to start building a lot of things.”
“We have to allow smart people to stay in our country — if you graduate number one in your class at Harvard, [if] you graduate from the Wharton School of Finance,” Trump said. “If we tell smart people to get the hell out, that’s not America first.”