Here’s a follow-up note to Nolan McKinney.
Mr. McKinney:
In reply to this note, you write that, in your earlier email, you “neglected mentioning the big factor depressing job growth, which is immigrant deportations.”
Fair enough.
In December it was estimated that, since January 2025, the number of foreign-born workers in the U.S. was down by 1.1 million, or a drop of 110,000 workers per month from February through November. This figure means that through December 2025, the loss of jobs held by foreign-born workers was roughly 1,210,000. Adding DOGE job losses to this figure (as before, assuming that no fired federal worker found new employment in 2025), we come up with a total deportation and DOGE job-loss figure for 2025 of 1,530,000, or 127,500 monthly.
Let’s add this figure to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s estimate of the actual average net monthly job gain in 2025 of 48,667. The hypothetical monthly job-gain figure we arrive at is 176,167 – a figure that is indeed in the same ballpark as the non-recession and non-covid-recovery average monthly net job-creation figure for 2000 through 2024 of 169,250.
But Pres. Trump boasts that his policies are good for American workers, implying that the only job gains that matter are those enjoyed by Americans. If, as Trump insists, immigrants ‘steal’ jobs from Americans, surely Americans would have quickly taken the jobs lost by immigrants, with the result for 2025 being an average monthly net job-gain figure close to 176,000, rather than the actual figure of less than 50,000. The fact that there was nothing close to such job growth in 2025 is powerful evidence that immigrants are not stealing jobs from Americans.
Nevertheless, focusing only on what you apparently believe are ‘legitimate’ workers….
How does the reported 2025 monthly net job-gain figure of 48,667 compare to job gains in the past if we exclude jobs held by ‘illegitimate’ immigrants? To find out, we must remove all jobs gained by ‘illegitimate’ immigrants in the past, which for our dataset means going back through the year 2000.
Let’s do a back-of-the-envelope estimation that likely overestimates the number of jobs created for immigrants prior to 2025. The typical illegal immigrant remains in the U.S. for at least a decade, but let’s strengthen your case by assuming that the typical illegal immigrant leaves the U.S. (or his or her job) every three years. Let’s further assume that the same number of immigrants (1,210,000) who lost jobs in 2025 due to Trump’s deportations entered the workforce every three non-recession, non-covid-recovery years between 2000 and 2024.
Therefore, for the entire span of the 17 non-recession, non-covid-recovery years from 2000 through 2024, the total estimated number of jobs created for ‘illegitimate’ immigrants was 6,856,667. [1,210,000 x (17/3).] This figure means that the total number of jobs created for ‘legitimate’ workers in America over these same years was 27,670,333. (Total job creation over these years was 34,527,000. Subtracting from this figure the number of jobs – 6,856,667 – created for ‘illegitimate’ immigrants, gives us the figure of 27,670,333.)
On average, then, for all of the non-recession, non-covid-recovery years from 2000 through 2024, the estimated average monthly net job gain for ‘legitimate’ workers was 135,639 (which is arrived at by dividing 27,670,333 by the number of months, 204, in these non-recession, non-covid-recovery years).
So taking the reported 2025 average monthly job-gain figure of 48,667 and adding to it the 26,667 monthly DOGE job losses, the resulting hypothetical average monthly job-gain figure for 2025 of 75,334 is still much less than – only 55 percent of – the estimated average monthly net ‘legitimate-worker’ job-gain figure, over the non-recession, non-covid-recovery years 2000-2024, of 135,639.
I suspect that a more systematic estimate of the number of jobs created from 2000 through 2024 for ‘legitimate’ workers – that is, excluding jobs created for ‘illegitimate’ immigrants – would show that job-creation performance in 2025 was even worse by comparison.
In 2025, job creation in the U.S. was poor – a fact that can’t be avoided by pointing to DOGE and deportations.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
