Native-Born Americans Are Not Losing Jobs to Foreigners

By Jeremy Horpedahl. Excerpts:

"Over the past five years, the US labor market has added, on net, 5.4 million jobs, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey. The establishment survey shows an even larger gain of seven million jobs. The differences between the household (Current Population Survey) and establishment (Current Employment Statistics) surveys is notable, but for the purposes of this post, I use the household survey because it has the necessary demographic information to analyze workers. Of those 5.4 million new jobs, almost all of the net gains have gone to foreign-born workers, who saw an increase of 4.7 million jobs. There are only about 650,000 more native-born workers in the United States than at the beginning of 2020.

Does this mean that foreigners actually are “taking our jobs”? No. To understand why, you need to know a little about the pool of potential native-born workers.

First, we need to recognize that even though the total number of native-born workers has fallen, the percentage of native-born Americans of prime working age (25–54) is slightly higher than it was five years ago. Using a 12-month average, it was 80.7 percent in January 2020 and 81.5 percent in January 2025. . Foreign-born workers also saw an increase over this time period, from 77.1 percent to 78.1 percent, and both of these measures are essentially at their highest readings going back to 2007, when the data series begins."

"The number of native-born Americans of prime working age is not growing: It has been basically flat since about 2013, as my Cato colleague Scott Lincicome showed in a recent essay. And this problem will only get worse: The US birth rate began declining in 2007—exactly 18 years ago, meaning that the upcoming crop of native-born Americans will be shrinking in the near future. The US fertility rate (births per woman) in 2023 was almost 25 percent lower than in 2007"

"Unlike native-born Americans, the foreign-born working-age population has been increasing in recent years. In contrast to the flat prime working-age (25–54) population for native-born workers since 2013, the comparable foreign-born population grew by almost five million over that same time frame. These data come from the Current Population Survey, a joint project of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census Bureau, and like any survey, they are subject to some issues, especially with sampling when it comes to groups that might be hard to identify, such as immigrants. But this is likely the best data we currently have for these measures (it is the same survey used to calculate the unemployment rate and other labor market measures)"