EJ Antoni of the Heritage Foundation writes in X (August 2):
Last year, native Americans lost 1.2 million jobs while employment of immigrants increased by 1.3 million; we’re just changing the American workforce right now, we’re not increasing the pie for everyone…
It gives this graph:
Source: EJ Antoni/Twitter.
I think Dr. Antoni uses July to July changes.
I wouldn’t blame someone for using an official thread from the US government; however, I would blame someone for quoting statistics out of context, including known warnings about what we now know about concerns about the population controls currently being used by the BLS. For someone who has doubts about the relevance of US government statistics (see here), this omission is surprising.
As Dr. Wendy Edelberg at the Hamilton Project/Brookings wrote in various articles, the population controls BLS used may be missing the rate of population change; the CBO also has information on this (which I used in my employment adjustment). He and Dr. Tara Watson provides this graph of changes (January to January, but you get the idea).
Source: Edelberg and Watson (2024).
Although the increase in the employment of immigrants is greater than that of the native-born, it is still the case that the employment of natives is increasing, according to Dr. Anthony.
* Wikipedia entry.
Source link