Heritage Foundation’s EJ Antoni writes on X (August 2):
Over the last year, native-born Americans have LOST 1.2 million jobs while foreign-born employment has increased 1.3 million; we’re just swapping out American workers at this point, not growing the pie for everyone…
He provides this graph:
Source: EJ Antoni/Twitter.
I think Dr. Antoni is using July to July changes.
I would not fault someone for using official series from the US government; however, I would fault someone for citing calculations without context, including well-known caveats about what we know now about concerns regarding the population controls currently used by BLS. For a person who is skeptical about the relevance of US government statistics (see here), this omission is somewhat surprising.
As Dr. Wendy Edelberg at Hamilton Project/Brookings has been documenting in various documents, the BLS population controls used might be missing a chunk of the population changes; the CBO has also some information in this respect (which I have used in my adjustment to civilian employment). She and Dr. Tara Watson provide this graph of changes (January to January, but you get the idea).
Source: Edelberg and Watson (2024).
While the cumulative change in foreign born employment is greater than that for native born, it’s still the case that cumulative native born employment is positive, contra Dr. Antoni.
