It seems likely that the Trump administration will use Friday’s jobs report to continue to argue that their immigration policies are creating job market opportunities for U.S.-born workers, but this claim is false and based on a misreading of data from the household survey. If anything, the job market for U.S.-born workers is worse so far in 2025 than it was in preceding years. Analysts following demographic trends from the household survey should concentrate on unemployment rates and employment ratios, rather than levels.

The unemployment rate for the U.S.-born population is higher in 2025 than previous years (see Figure A). The July rate of 4.7% has not been this high since 2021. Similarly, the prime-age employment-to-population ratio for U.S.-born workers may be moving downwards and is certainly not consistent with booming employment (see Figure B).

Although the monthly jobs reports estimate population or employment levels by U.S.-born or foreign-born status from the household Current Population Survey (CPS), using these estimates of levels to compare changes over time can be misleading, especially since the beginning of 2025. This is because CPS population levels and growth rates are adjusted once per year each January in order to reflect the best available population projections. Normally this adjustment has relatively minor effects, but the combination of a large January 2025 CPS population adjustment and Trump’s immigration policies are causing the size of the U.S.-born population to be mismeasured. Many economists have pointed out this concern, but it is worth reviewing in light of false claims that U.S.-born employment is surging.

Every year in January, the CPS adjusts population estimates by race and ethnicity, age, and sex. The adjustment causes level changes in the January 2025 population estimates for these groups and also predetermines population growth rates for the entire calendar year. In January 2025, these adjustments resulted in a large, measured population jump between December 2024 and January 2025 due to better information about immigration flows in previous years.

At the same time, because of Trump’s immigration policies, the measured share of the immigrant population is rapidly falling: immigrants are leaving the U.S. or entering at lower rates, and the climate of fear due to increased arrests, detentions, and deportations is making survey responses less reliable. For example, immigrants may be reporting that they are actually U.S.-born, or they may fail to respond to the survey at all. All of this has led to the measured immigrant share of the population falling in recent months.

But given that the total estimated CPS population size is predetermined each January, a measured decrease in the share of the immigrant population will automatically result in higher U.S.-born population levels. The resulting spurious increase in estimated U.S.-born population levels then drives an increase in measured U.S.-born employment levels. This happens even as employment-to-population ratios, as shown before, show no corresponding increase. In essence, to claim credit for the rise in measured employment levels for U.S.-born workers in the face of a falling employment-to-population ratio, the Trump administration would have to prove their immigration policies were increasing the total U.S.-born population over a course of a few months—a clearly preposterous claim.

Indeed, another way to see that the measured U.S.-born employment increase is misleading is to observe that the number of U.S.-born nonworkers is increasing. Figure C shows that the number of U.S.-born people who are unemployed or not in the labor force increased sharply in 2025 and still increased in July, when the usual seasonal pattern shows a decrease in nonworkers. If Trump administration policies are leading to a boom in opportunity for U.S.-born workers, why are so many more U.S.-born workers not working in 2025? The answer, again, is that the measured CPS levels are highly misleading given pre-existing population counts. 

These level changes are not to be relied upon for any serious analysis. Instead, analysts seeking to actually understand the current state of the labor market from the CPS should focus on unemployment rates and employment-to-population ratios. When properly focusing on these more accurate measures, it is clear that U.S.-born workers are facing a worse labor market in 2025.