Foreign Born Employment - What does the data say?

by Levi A. Russell

An unfortunate reality of punditry is that being entertaining trumps understanding of reality when it comes to building an audience. The result of this is that people who get all their information from pundits are comically illiterate about the general broad strokes of how our economy functions. I’m going to briefly step through a recent example of ignorant punditry on X. My hope is that you’ll have a better sense of how to filter out stupid claims in the future.

Let’s look at the hysterical claims made by several so-called policy wonks on X last week. The claim made by “Maine Wonk” is that foreign born employment has suddenly spiked back up higher than January 2025. Charts like this had been going around X for the past few days. The implication is that deportations aren’t happening at any respectable pace and that suddenly a bunch of foreign workers jumped back into the workforce unexpectedly.

So what’s the problem? Foreign born employment did, in fact, move up recently! Yes, it did, but the problem is that this uptick doesn’t support the claim that deportations are either nonexistent or very slow. Specifically, the BLS data series called “Employment Level - Foreign Born” is not seasonally adjusted. I don’t know why, but the data that FRED imports, and everyone refers to, does not account for the fact that there are seasonal swings in employment. Consistently, year after year, employment for foreign-born employees falls during autumn, bottoms out in the winter, and rises through the spring into summer.

To account for this and to determine the trend in foreign born employment, I applied a seasonal adjustment and computed the average monthly change in foreign born employment. To estimate some kind of political component to the numbers, I’ve broken the seasonally-adjusted data into 4 year presidential administrations.

Obama’s first and second terms both saw increases in foreign born employment. During his second term, foreign born employment nearly doubled! Trump’s first term saw a minor reduction of about a half million, with a monthly disemployment pace of nearly 11,000. As you’d expect to see, foreign born employment exploded during Biden’s term in office, increasing roughly 20% from beginning to end.

So far during Trump’s second term, we have 15 months of data. In that time, foreign born employment has declined by 828k seasonally-adjusted jobs, averaging a reduction of roughly 64,000 per month.

The bottom line is that there are important considerations that have to be accounted for when drawing conclusions from economic data. I’m not running interference for the expert class or that some kind of degree is necessary to understand these things. Rather, I want you to know that it’s possible to learn how to adjudicate claims made by pundits and wonks. If you have questions about data-based economic claims made by pundits, please put them in the comments. I might dig into some of them and write more posts like this!