The increase in employment among immigrants is not a Biden conspiracy

An example is offered by the fringe-right site Zerohedge. In response to Friday’s new employment data, it shared a post on social media alleging that the country “has created ZERO JOBS for native-born Americans since July 2018” while “most job creation in the past year has gone to illegal aliens.” It’s useful rhetoric both because it dismisses the data as flawed and suggests that the flaws are rooted in Biden’s border policies, a central line of attack on the right as November approaches.

Those claims, though, are nonsense, a misinterpretation or misrepresentation of obvious, long-term trends.

It is true that employment among native-born Americans has not changed much relative to a pre-pandemic peak — one that occurred during the administration not of Joe Biden but of Donald Trump. It is also true that the number of foreign-born U.S. residents who are working is up since before the pandemic, as data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show.

Those foreign-born residents are not immigrants in the country illegally. They are largely citizens or immigrants authorized to work in the country. After all, there are nearly 46 million foreign-born residents of the United States, including naturalized citizens, and only around 11 million undocumented immigrants.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which calculates employment in the United States, breaks down the population in a number of ways. It separates out native- and foreign-born populations (as well as a number of other demographic groupings, like race and gender). It then looks at the population aged 16 and over, which is the pool of people considered eligible for employment.

U.S. residents over the age of 15 are categorized as being either members of the labor force or not. Those who are not are generally retired, not looking for work or on disability. Those who are in the labor force either have jobs or don’t. This breakdown allows us to visualize the change in 16-and-over population over time, with the native-born population (in orange) and the foreign-born population (in green) represented relative to a shared baseline.

You can see the effects of the pandemic there in the light-colored middle bars. That surge in unemployment waned over time.

But also notice that the total height of the orange section — native-born residents — has stayed fairly flat. The size of the green section, by contrast, has continued to get bigger. If we overlay the 16-and-over population on our first chart, we see that the population patterns for each group look a lot like the employment patterns.

If we visualize this in terms of percentage-point change since the pandemic low (rather than raw counts) that’s more obvious.

This is a function both of lower birthrates among native-born Americans and of immigration to the United States, but not necessarily only recently. Using Census Bureau data, we can look at the shift in the composition of the population since 2007, the year when the BLS data begin.

In 2007, 13.7 percent of the population was foreign-born (indicated by the dotted line at left). In 2023, 16.1 percent was. The native-born population grew by 8 percent over that period; the foreign-born population, in part because it is smaller, grew by 31 percent.

But what’s most important is that light-orange section at the top, the native-born population that is aged 65 and over. It grew 54 percent since 2007, and is now nearly as large as the entire foreign-born population.

Why this surge? Because of the post-World War II baby boom. The peak year of births during that population surge was in 1957. Add 65 to 1957, and you get 2022. It is not surprising, then that many native-born American adults are leaving the workforce. Since 2007, the size of the native-born labor force has increased by about 6 percent. The size of the 16-and-over population that isn’t in the labor force has grown by 24 percent.

There’s a lot of overlap here. Older Americans are more likely to be native-born because immigration was restricted until soon after the baby boom ended. They’re also less likely to have children. Immigration — including legal immigration that led to work permits or citizenship — became easier. These are patterns that have nothing to do with Joe Biden or recent immigration.

In 2007, demographer Dowell Myers wrote a book called “Immigrants and Boomers.” It looked, among other things, at how the looming surge in retirements would necessitate filling vacancies in the workforce with increased immigration.

This was not a prediction of Bidenomics. It was, instead, an observation about where things were headed — and where they’ve arrived.