Trump Allies Attack Strong Jobs Report As Bad For ‘native Born Americans’

The labor market may still be hot, but the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc. is using the better-than-expected jobs report released Friday to hit President Joe Biden on another front — immigration.

The Labor Department’s report that the U.S. economy added 272,000 jobs in May “paints a dire picture for the American economy,” MAGA Inc. wrote in a press release titled “May Jobs Report: Immigrants Win While Native Born Americans Lose.” The release cites a decrease in the number of “native born Americans” who are employed and an increase in the number of “foreign born workers” who had jobs in May compared to April.

MAGA Inc. also pointed to comments from CNBC’s senior economics reporter Steve Liesman, who on Friday morning said “there’s an immigration piece to this” while discussing the jobs report.

“There are bodies available, and there is work for them to do. Whether or not they’re here legally or not is a different story,” Liesman said, which MAGA Inc. quotes in the release. What’s not included, however, were his follow-up remarks adding “that’s the political story.”

“The economic story is there’s work for them to do, they’re being put to work,” Liesman said. “I did not get to look at the non-native hiring in this survey yet, but I’m sure it’s pretty healthy.”

Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement to POLITICO that “Trump’s team is pushing racist, nativist attacks” and “trying to divide our country to help himself” instead of “outlining a vision to grow the economy.”

“This reads like a statement from the racist, nativist politicians of the 1800s who vilified immigrants and divided Americans to gain power,” Moussa said. “It’s also wrong: under Joe Biden’s leadership, 15.6 million more Americans have jobs and the unemployment rate has been at or under 4% since January 2022. That’s an economic record that Donald Trump can only dream about.”

Unemployment plunged to modern-era lows in 2022 as economic activity took off in the wake of the pandemic, and the high demand for workers meant that there were as many as two vacancies for every available worker. Growth in worker pay picked up as employers bid up wages to compete for help.

But a surge in foreign-born workers participating in the labor force — whether new arrivals or immigrants already here — has helped bring the job market into better balance and prevent a “wage-price spiral,” where higher pay and higher prices feed into each other. That’s aided the Federal Reserve in its fight against inflation, at least in the short term.

Labor Department data likely take into account many of the jobs held by undocumented immigrants, as companies can report hires regardless of employees’ legal status. But Goldman Sachs researchers estimated earlier this year that payroll numbers likely undercounted employment from unauthorized immigration by 100,000 to 400,000 jobs in 2023.

One reason that immigrants are disproportionately adding to the labor force is that the native-born population is aging, with large numbers of Baby Boomers reaching retirement age.

Despite the large number of net jobs added in May, the unemployment rate ticked up to 4 percent — still low, but the highest level since January 2022.

At a town hall on Thursday, Donald Trump laid into Biden’s recent executive action on immigration — which enables him to shut down asylum claims between official ports of entry once an average of 2,500 crossings a day over a seven day period is surpassed — vowing to rescind the president’s “outrageous” move and seal the border on day one if he is reelected.

“Biden’s order is not a border security plan,” Trump said at the town hall, hosted in the key battleground and border state of Arizona. “It’s a concession to the fact that he has lost control over a border. And it’s a really dangerous place.”

Trump promised if reelected, his administration will “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in the history of our country.”

When asked for his response to Trump describing his executive action as “weak and pathetic,” Biden referenced the bipartisan border deal aimed at increasing security that Trump slammed earlier this year.

“Is he describing himself?” Biden told ABC’s David Muir on Thursday. “Come on, look, everybody knows what’s happened. We had a deal, it was much broader than this, much better, much more accepted across the board, and he got on the phone and told the Republicans, don’t support it. It will hurt me, it will help Biden.”