There are so many absurdities coming out of the Trump administration on the economy that it’s hard to keep up. But one recurring theme with a solid basis in a misunderstanding of statistics is the claim that employment of native-born workers is exploding under Trump, after plummeting under Biden. We even got an official tweet of this ignorance from the Labor Department over Thanksgiving weekend.

The problem, as I and others have explained, is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has no direct count of native-born workers. It derives a number for native-born workers from its population controls, which are set in stone at the start of the year from Census data, and the number of foreign-born people, which it gets from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS).

The number of native-born people is calculated by subtracting the number of foreign-born people from the CPS. The number of employed native-born workers is then calculated from the percentage of native-born people who report working. This methodology means that if fewer people answer the survey saying they are foreign-born, it will automatically increase the number of people that are reported as native-born, thereby raising the number of native-born workers.

There are three obvious reasons why the CPS would show fewer foreign-born workers. The first is that some number of immigrants have actually left the country, either through deportation or “self-deportation.” There is little doubt that our foreign-born population is lower today than it was a year ago.

The second reason is that immigrants might refuse to answer the survey. In the current environment, an immigrant, even someone here legally, may be reluctant to answer the door when someone says they are from the government doing a survey.

The third reason is that immigrants may not answer the survey accurately. In the current climate, many foreign-born residents who choose to answer the survey may simply say that they were born in the United States. This is especially likely since the current administration insists it does not have to respect commitments of confidentiality.

Anyhow, we know that the number of people reporting that they are foreign-born has plummeted. As of September, it was down almost 400,000 from the prior year. By contrast, the number of native-born people over age 16 had risen by more than 5.5 million. In the prior year the native-born population over age 16 had shrunk by more than 400,000.

That implies more people died than turned 16 in the year from September 2023 to September 2024. That may not be accurate, but that is the nature of the population projections that underly the jobs numbers in the CPS. The population controls are set at the start of the year and then the number of native-born reported is calculated by subtracting the number of foreign-born people reported by survey.

The Trumpers apparently want us to believe that Trump somehow got an additional 5.5 million native-born people to turn 16 in the last year. That is how they get the explosion in employment for the native-born they are boasting about.

The simple point that any serious person should understand is that the numbers on native-born workers reported in the CPS are essentially meaningless, given its construction. However, the CPS does give useful information about the labor market for native-born workers. The data on employment to population ratios (EPOP) and unemployment rates are reasonably accurate.

Here the picture was pretty good under Biden, with little change during Trump’s current term.

The EPOP quickly bounced back from its pandemic troughs, and by the summer of 2023 it was just below 60 percent, less than 1 percentage point below its pre-pandemic peak. This number is depressed somewhat in the post-pandemic period by the large-scale retirement of the baby boom cohorts, most of whom are now over age 65.

This can be controlled by just looking at prime age workers (ages 25 t0 54) or alternatively by focusing on the unemployment rate for native-born workers. The latter shows a better performance under Biden than Trump. The low point for the unemployment rate under Biden was 3.1 percent in April of 2023, compared to a first-term low for Trump of 3.4 percent for three months in 2019. The unemployment rate for native-born workers was 4.3 percent for September, the most recent month available.

That is still a relatively low unemployment rate by historical standards, but it is not anything to brag about compared to the Biden years or even Trump’s first term. As with so many other great things about the economy Trump touts, the employment boom for native-born workers exists only in Donald Trump’s head.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

The post Trumpian Nonsense on Employing Native-Born Workers appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.