The figures in this post from the Department of Labor are based on a technical statistical adjustment, not on real changes in employment for native-born or foreign-born workers.
Every January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics updates the population weights used in the household survey (CPS) to reflect new Census estimates. In January 2025, this adjustment added roughly 2 million people to the “employed” category and more than 2 million to the “labor force” — on paper — even though these individuals did not actually enter employment that month.
Because BLS does not revise earlier months of the household survey, this one-time update appears as a sudden spike between December and January. It is a statistical correction, not a labor-market event.
The post above incorrectly treats this one-month benchmarking adjustment as evidence of job gains for native-born Americans and job losses for foreign-born workers. In reality, the underlying economy did not add or subtract millions of workers in these categories. This was simply the result of updated Census population estimates being applied to the survey.
A more accurate interpretation is:
The January re-benchmarking raised employment and labor-force levels for statistical reasons,
but it did not represent genuine job creation or job loss,
and it should not be used to evaluate policy or economic performance.
It is not certain whether this distortion of the technical statistical adjustment is intentionally misleading or simply reflects confusion within the Department of Labor about how these periodic revisions work.
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