Wrecking Crew 2a: Looking Back At The Trump Years

Was Trump Better Or Worse Regarding Native vs Foreign Born Workers

This is something of a follow-up to my Saturday article discussing Jerome Powell’s curious comment regarding immigration levels with respect to rising unemployment in this country.

In that article I was focused on the 2024 year-to-date demographic changes. Prompted by a reader I am reviewing that same data on a longer historical timeline, comparing the Donald Trump years against the (Biden-)Harris years

Yet we do not need to comment much on the “why” to see that there are clear economic ramifications to immigration policy. There are clear employment ramifications to immigration policy. Necessarily, there are clear economic and employment ramifications to the failure of the (Biden-)Harris Administration to effectively address illegal immigration along the southern border.

Wrecking Crew 2: Did Jay Powell Say The Quiet Part Out Loud?

As my readers pointed out, these impacts are not confined to just this past year. The economic and employment impacts of immigrations exist in every year. If people are to have a meaningful discussion about immigration and employment in this economy, we have to asses how some of the migration flows have varied over the years.

First, I want to give a quick shoutout to reader “

Doubting T.

” , whose comment prompted this deeper dive into the information.

Compare immigration numbers pre JB even the Obama and Bush years which generally were akin to Djt years and is appx 500k per year to appx 2mil plus per year, or 4x

So…let’s begin.

As before, I want to set a proper context, by reminding readers that native born individuals in this country vastly outnumber of foreign born individuals, and have almost since the founding of the Republic.

The same holds true for the civilian labor force level.

We should not, because of the dominance of the native born cohort within the population, infer any animus or negative inclination towards immigrants.

That being said, when we look at the US population level year by year, the (Biden-)Harris Administration has had considerably more immigrant growth than during Donald Trump’s first term.

We see a similar demographic shift when we look at year by year changes in the labor force.

An intriguing shift becomes even more pronounced when we look at the year by year trend in employment levels.

From 2021 onward, employment growth among native born individuals has steadily slowed and so far in 2024 is in the negative. This is a complete reversal of the growth trend we see during President Trump’s term of office.

Note that we see a similar trend when looking at the labor force and the overall population, although the trend is much less pronounced at those broader levels.

It perhaps should come as no surprise that the trend reverses when we start to look at unemployment figures year by year.

The cohort of individuals not in the labor force presents a far more muddled picture year by year.

The “COVID years” of 2020 and 2021 are, unsurprisingly, fairly volatile. That being said, while there is not a clear year by year trend in the data, it is perhaps noteworthy that the shifts during the (Biden-)Harris Administration are far more pronounced than they were during the Trump Administration, for both foreign born and native born workers.

That same muddle picture prevails when we aggregate unemployment and individuals not in the labor force into a single synthetic “net joblessness metric.”

When it comes to measures of individuals who are not working, the shifts are simply smaller—and more negative (meaning the numbers of individuals without a job are declining) for the pre-COVID Trump years than after.

This alone is an noteworthy commentary on Trump’s economic track record.

What are we to make of this data?

One conclusion we can fairly draw is that during the (Biden-)Harris years this country has seen a marked shift towards hiring foreign born workers. What makes this shift particularly problematic is that, so far in 2024 at least, we are seeing an increase in joblessness among native born workers.

There is a steady increase year on year among the unemployed for native workers which we do not see among foreign born workers. At the same time, we are seeing a stead decline in the employment level for native workers, while the level for foreign workers increases.

All of which confirms the trends I first highlighted a few weeks back.

Bidenomics Is Working? For Whom?

Whether by accident or design, the economic policies and agendas of the (Biden-)Harris Administration have produced a clear employment bias towards foreign born workers—and there is reason to consider that the emphasis may be resulting in increased joblessness for native born workers.

While there is some indication of a bias against foreign born workers during the Trump years, that signal appears in the data largely out of the population-level data, which charted a significant decline in the foreign born in 2019.

But this also provides further confirmation of Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s comments on Wednesday. Whether one wishes to argue it for good or for ill, there is no denying that the (Biden-)Harris Administration’s policies particularly on immigration have had—and continue to have—strong knock-on effects on employment and joblessness.

By comparison, Donald Trump’s economic track record from his first term was overall good for native born workers while being at worst uneven with foreign born workers, a balance the (Biden-)Harris Administration has completely reversed.

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have pledged to be a President for “all Americans”. Arguably, the employment data tells us which one did more to keep that promise when they were in the White House, and that gives us an idea of which one will do more to keep that promise starting next year.