President Donald Trump’s bold claims that his policies delivered an unprecedented jobs boom for American-born workers are at odds with data showing a weaker market than under his predecessor.
Trump, 79, has repeatedly boasted that all new job gains have gone to U.S.-born workers since he returned to office. “In the year before my election, all net creation of jobs was going to foreign migrants. Since I took office, 100 percent of all net job creation has gone to American-born citizens,” Trump said during an address to the nation last month. “One hundred percent.”
Administration officials have parroted that rhetoric, saying on X in November that what Trump “is doing for our workforce is nothing short of HISTORIC.”
“While other Presidents allowed foreign workers to flood the job market, President Trump is working to ensure ALL jobs created go to our workers,” the U.S. Department of Labor’s X account posted.
Economists, however, are calling Trump’s bluff. Citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Washington Post reported Friday that the labor market itself has weakened, leaving U.S.-born workers modestly worse off than they had been under former President Joe Biden.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
“The unemployment rate has been rising for both native-born and foreign-born adults,” Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former Commerce Department economist, told the Post.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment among native-born workers was higher in late 2025 than a year earlier. The not seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for U.S.-born workers rose from 3.9 percent in November 2024 to 4.3 percent in November 2025.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Trump’s claims that his immigration policies are creating job market opportunities for U.S.-born workers are “false and based on a misreading of data from the household survey.”
“If anything, the job market for U.S.-born workers is worse so far in 2025 than it was in preceding years,” senior economist Ben Zipperer wrote in September.
In August, Jed Kolko, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and undersecretary for economic affairs at the US Department of Commerce under Biden, accused the president of committing a “multiple-count data felony” in trumpeting a jobs boom for native-born Americans.
Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement to the Post that “mindless nitpicking doesn’t change the simple fact that President Trump has done more for American workers than any president in history by cracking down on visa program abuses, successfully negotiating new trade deals, securing our border, and carrying out the largest mass deportation of illegal aliens.”
Rogers said those policies ensure “American-born workers can finally benefit from our new economic resurgence.”
The post Trump’s Boasts About Jobs for U.S.-Born Workers Hit by Humiliating Reality Check appeared first on The Daily Beast.
