The Heritage Foundation’s EJ Antoni writes about X. (August 2):
Last year, Native Americans lost 1.2 million jobs, while foreign-born employment gained 1.3 million. We are replacing American workers, not growing the pie for everyone…
He provides the following graph:
source: EJ Anthony/Twitter.
I think Dr. Anthony is using the July to July changes.
I wouldn’t blame anyone for using the official US government series, but I would blame someone for quoting the calculations out of context. This includes well-known clues about what we know about the concerns about population control currently used by the BLS. For those skeptical of the relevance of US government statistics (see here), this omission is somewhat surprising.
As Dr. Wendy Edelberg of the Hamilton Project/Brookings has documented in various papers, the BLS population control used may have missed some of the population change. CBO also has some information on this (I used it to adjust for private employment). She and Dr. Tara Watson provide this graph of the change (it’s January to January, but you get the idea).
source: Edelberg and Watson (2024).
Although the cumulative change in employment for the foreign-born is greater than that for the U.S.-born, contrary to Dr. Anthony’s comments, cumulative employment for the U.S.-born remains positive.
