The Washington Post points out that in the Trump admin crowing about people working?
A LOT of those people are guess what?
Immigrants….
It’s not as though the job numbers under Trump suddenly became exceptional. He was inaugurated in January 2017, indicated on the chart below by a vertical line. The trend since mid-2011 has been pretty consistent, continuing into Trump’s presidency.
There’s another factor worth mentioning here: population.
When Trump has in the past crowed about the record number of Americans working, we’ve pointed out that there are also a record number of Americans. As the population has increased, the number of people working has increased. From July 2016 to July 2018, the country added about 4 million people 18 or older and 4.7 million jobs. From July 2014 to July 2016, the country added 4.7 million adults and 5.4 million jobs. The ratio of new jobs to new people from 2014 to 2016 was 1.16. The ratio from July 2016 to July 2018 was 1.16.
But there’s another component to Trump’s bragging about new jobs that bears mentioning: More than a third of those new jobs went to immigrants.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t release seasonally adjusted data on foreign-born employment every month, but it does release an annual summary. The most recent, published in May, found that about 17 percent of people working in the United States were born outside the country, a bit over 1 in 6. The unemployment rate among immigrants, in fact, is lower than that of native-born Americans.
Month-by-month non-adjusted data shows what that looks like.
On that scale, the increase is hard to pick out. If we look at employment among the foreign-born on a monthly basis, we can see how that group makes up an increasing percentage of the pool of employed people.
In 2017, 66 percent of the foreign-born who were able to work were employed, compared with 62.2 percent of native-born Americans. Native-born Americans earned more, though, in part because of the types of jobs the foreign-born are more likely to hold…..