With the United States’ economic outlook appearing increasingly grim toward the end of President Donald Trump's first year back in office, right-wing media apologists of his failing agenda have glommed onto a misleading data point to boast of his supposed success — celebrating the false claim that native-born U.S. workers are exclusively benefiting from job growth.

On December 16, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published its jobs report for November, which had been delayed as a result of the federal government shutdown. The report showed a labor market in clear distress with mediocre month-to-month job creation (+64,000 jobs in November), significant negative revisions of already-weak prior months (-33,000 jobs in August and September), and a rising unemployment rate (4.6% in November, the highest unemployment rate in four years). The report also contained a preliminary estimate of job creation for October (the Labor Department will never publish a report for that month) showing that the economy lost approximately 105,000 jobs.

Economist Heather Long described the new jobs report in blunt terms: “The US economy is in a hiring recession.” Harvard University economist and former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Jason Furman said “the headline jobs numbers are almost uniformly weak” and the prolonged government shutdown was responsible for “only some” of the economic malaise. University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers noted “the headline numbers suggest VIRTUALLY NO EMPLOYMENT GROWTH since April (‘Liberation day’).”

The Trump administration put out the word to celebrate “native-born” workers

Minutes after the November jobs report was published, the Department of Labor posted a graphic on X (formerly Twitter) which boasted “every single job created has been in the PRIVATE SECTOR and gone to a native-born AMERICAN.”

Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni — who Trump recently failed to install at the BLS — published the same sentiment, claiming the “number of native-born Americans w/ jobs is up 2.6 million over the last 12 months.” Antoni published a December 17 op-ed in Townhall wherein he chided the Biden administration for supposedly overseeing a period where “all net job growth went to foreign-born workers.”

During a December 16 appearance on Fox News’ America Reports, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt proclaimed “what’s most remarkable about the labor market right now is that President Trump is putting American citizens back into the labor force.” Leavitt falsely added that “under the previous administration and Joe Biden, 100% of the jobs gained were for foreign-born workers — these were people who flooded our country and took the jobs of hard-working Americans.”

Leavitt’s argument was reiterated on Fox Business, where The Bottom Line co-host Dagen McDowell boasted “American workers prioritized once again — since January, 21,000 foreign-born workers have lost jobs, with a massive 2.63 million native-born workers gaining jobs.”

Fox Business host and former Trump administration official Larry Kudlow sang from the same hymnal that afternoon, announcing “native-born jobs up 2.7 million, foreign-born jobs down almost a million,” adding that “all that [is] about closing the border.”

Experts debunked claims that Trump has been good for native-born workers

Center for Economic and Policy Research senior economist Dean Baker replied to the Department of Labor’s post by noting that “the employment rate for native-born Americans was higher under Biden than it is now.” Baker added, likely referencing Trump’s firing of the BLS chief: “But you fired everyone there who knows arithmetic.”

Economic Security Project senior director for policy and research Mike Konczal wrote: “Mass deportations were going to create opportunities to bring down the unemployment rate for native-born workers. And....you can guess how that's going.” Konczal embedded a chart showing the monthly native-born unemployment rate higher in 2025 than the previous two years.

Economics writer Joseph Politano cited a similar chart, writing: “Unsurprisingly, Trump's immigration crackdown is not delivering labor market improvements for the US-born. Over the last year, native-born unemployment is up from 3.9% to 4.3% while native-born employment has decreased by a similar amount.”

Politano also responded to Antoni’s social media post: “Total misinformation—the rise in native-born employment *levels* is because population totals are only updated yearly & between updates they erroneously believe any decrease in the immigrant population means 1:1 rising US-born population. US-born *unemployment* is actually UP!”

Previously, Baker and Peterson Institute senior fellow Jed Kolko have explained that the population numbers used by conservatives to make native-born vs. foreign-born employment comparisons are a statistical artifact and are both inaccurate for this kind of measurement and also contain warnings from government statistics agencies against using the numbers that way.

Former Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell, who now serves as economics editor at The Bulwark, explained the Trump administration's misleading argument during a December 16 discussion on Bulwark Takes. Rampell noted that the U.S. has lost jobs in three of the last six months and argued that “manufacturing appears to be in recession despite all of the promises of a manufacturing renaissance because of Trump’s trade wars.” She also explained that prior periods when net job growth appeared to favor immigrant workers were “about demographics” driven by “old, native-born Americans retiring and leaving the labor force” amid “an increase of younger, working-age immigrants coming in.” Rampell stressed that the data did not show that immigrants were taking jobs from American workers, despite how it might be spun by Trump and his media allies.

This is not the first time right-wing media have attempted to pit native-born and foreign-born workers against one another in their zero-sum view of the economy. The same media ecosystem that would later calcify around Trump was pushing xenophobic claims about immigrants absorbing all of the jobs created during the Obama administration, and conservative personalities deployed the same fundamental misunderstanding of the data to undermine the strength of the labor market during Biden’s last year in office.