Foreign Born Workers Provided Over 100% of Employment Gains Since Year Ago – MishTalk

Over the past 5 years, foreign born workers provided 77 percent of all employment gains. Foreign born does not imply illegal.

The Foreign Born numbers from the BLS are not seasonally adjusted. That means we can only compare year-over-year numbers, not month-over month.

It also means we need to use NSA umbers for the US and total employment levels.

If you incorrectly mix and match and adjust the starting point, you can get 5-year numbers close to or possibly exceeding 100 percent. By that I mean subtracting January, February or March numbers from May numbers (smaller font numbers in the above chart red, green, and blue).

Chart Details

• Over the past year, US born employment fell by 298,000 while foreign born employment rose by 637,000. The net impact is a gain of 339,000.
• Since May of 2019, foreign born employment is up by 3.2 million while US born employment is up by 971,000.
• Over the past 5 years, foreign born employment accounted for 77 percent of all employment gains.

Foreign Born Definition

The U.S. Census Bureau uses the term foreign born to refer to anyone who is not a U.S. citizen at birth. This includes naturalized U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents (immigrants), temporary migrants (such as foreign students), humanitarian migrants (such as refugees and asylees), and unauthorized migrants.

Unlike others, I am not going to speculate on how much of this is illegal immigration. I don’t know.

Watch the Year-Over-Year Trends

• 2021: FB +3.4 Million, US: +10.7 Million
• 2022: FB +2.9 Million, US: +3.9 Million
• 2023: FB +1.6 Million, US: +0.8 Million
• 2024: FB +0.6 Million, US: -0.3 Million

The trends are from May-to-May.

Employment has nearly stalled but people are cheering today’s “beat the street” bizarro jobs report.

Part-Time Employment and Multiple Job Holders

Part-time jobs and multiple jobholders are just under all-time highs. However, they are not significantly higher than pre-pandemic peaks.

The question of the infamous BLS Birth-Death adjustment came up again on Twitter today. Birth-Death pertains to the net number of jobs the BLS assumes are being created by new businesses created minus the number of employees lost by businesses going out of business.

It’s a complicated mess and most make invalid assumptions regarding the process. I will review the process again, with some new thoughts in a subsequent post.

For now, hardly anyone believes today’s jobs report, including me.

Another Bizarro Jobs Report

For discussion of today’s incredulous jobs report please see Another Bizarro Jobs Report – Payrolls Rise 272,000 Employment Drop 408,000