1.2 Million U.S.-Born Workers Lost Their Jobs Last Month While Foreign Workers Gained 668,000

Over 1.2 million native born U.S. workers lost their jobs between July and August, while foreign born workers gained 668,000 jobs, according to the latest Employment Situation report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The BLS defines “foreign-born” as “those residing in the United States who were not U.S. citizens at birth.”

To be foreign-born, an individual must be born outside the United States or one of its outlying areas such as Puerto Rico or Guam, to non-citizen parents.

Native-born persons are those born in U.S., Puerto Rico, or Guam, or born abroad to at least one citizen parent.

The BLS report, released Friday, shows that 131,031,000 native-born U.S. workers were employed in August, an employment to population ratio of 59.5 percent.

This is down by over 1.2 million from the July employment numbers for native-born workers, a decrease in the employment to population ratio by 0.4 percent — the largest decrease since the pandemic in March and April of 2020.

During the same time period, the number of foreign-born U.S. workers spiked by 668,000, the largest increase in a decade, from 29.7 million to almost 30.4 million — with their employment to population ratio increasing by the same proportion the U.S. born ratio fell, 0.4 percent.

In January, the total number of employed U.S.-born workers was 130 million — which shows employment levels for native-born Americans has stagnated in 2023, while the number of foreign-born workers has increased steadily, from 28.6 million in January to more than 30 million in August.

The BLS surveys do not track the legal immigration status of foreign-born workers, but states that “at least some undocumented immigrants” are included in the data.

During the first three years of the Trump administration, the foreign-born workforce expanded by 752,000 between August 2017 to 2019, according to analysis of BLS data by the Daily Mail.

From August 2021 to 2023, the first three years of the Biden administration, the foreign-born workforce expanded by 3.943 million.