Is J.D. Vance right that native-born Americans have seen no net job growth under Biden?

Echoing a Republican talking point, Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, claimed that all jobs created during the Biden administration have gone to foreign-born workers and that illegal immigration was leading to the "decimation of the American middle class."

Vance said that during a March 14 interview on Fox News’ "Jesse Watters Primetime." Watters prefaced the conversation saying that Tyson Foods was laying off employees in Perry, Iowa, and hiring asylum seekers recruited in New York.

Vance said he didn’t know the details of the Tyson matter, but that illegal immigration reduced American workers’ wages "by replacing American citizens with foreign laborers who are willing to work at slave wages."

Toward the end of the interview, Vance compared jobs and hiring patterns under former President Donald Trump and under President Joe Biden:

"If you go back to the Trump economy, you had American jobs going to American workers. You had wages rising," Vance said. "Under the Biden economy, you have those American workers getting fired and replaced with foreign labor. This is not an exaggeration. All net job creation — you heard me right, 100% of net job creation under the Biden administration — has gone to the foreign-born."

Is Vance right  that all net job creation under Biden has only benefited foreign-born workers?

Luke Schroeder, a Vance spokesperson, told PolitiFact that Vance’s statement on Fox News "is fully supported by government data and analysis from leading nonpartisan think tanks. The impacts of Joe Biden’s immigration policies are clear: fewer jobs for American citizens and more jobs for the foreign born."

As evidence, Schroeder pointed to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower immigration. The study found that there were 183,000 fewer native-born workers employed in the fourth quarter of 2023 than in the fourth quarter of 2019. 

However, the study’s starting point is before Biden’s presidency began. Vance’s claim also omits that unemployment for native-born workers is low by historical standards and that 5.7 million jobs have gone to native-born workers from February 2021, Biden’s first full month in office, to February 2024.

The foreign-born labor force is relatively small — in 2023, foreign-born workers accounted for just under 20% of all workers. The foreign-born workforce include people who are in the U.S. legally, including people who have become U.S. citizens.

The employment of foreign-born workers has been growing for years, especially since the pandemic in 2020. 

By 2022, foreign-born workers’ share of the labor force reversed all of its pandemic-era decline and then began exceeding its pre-pandemic level, calculations by Evgeniya A. Duzhak, a regional policy economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, showed. This is projected to help the economy grow by about $7 trillion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

"Something important is going on, and it’s very hard in real time to figure it out," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right American Action Forum. 

During Biden’s presidency, job growth among foreign-born workers has increased at a faster rate than the hiring of native-born workers.

Overall growth in the foreign-born population is likely driving its faster employment growth, said Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. 

Recent migrants — some of whom can qualify for work permits after six months as they await asylum decisions — are in their prime working years (20s to 50s). By contrast, many native-born Americans belong to the baby boom generation (in their 60s and 70s), and more of them are retiring every year.

There’s also a long-standing pattern of foreign-born workers participating in the workforce at higher rates than native-born Americans. The gap has widened slightly in the past few years.

However, it’s hard to know how much of this gap comes from voluntary reasons (such as parenting, returning to school or retiring), or from being outcompeted for jobs by immigrants.

Vance’s evidence, the Center for Immigration Studies’ analysis, compared employment in the fourth quarter 2019 with the fourth quarter 2023. The fourth quarter covers October, November and December.

The study found that 183,000 fewer native-born workers were employed in 2023 compared with 2019. In contrast, almost 2.9 million more foreign-born workers were employed in 2023 than in 2019.

But in the first year covered by the study, Biden "had no influence whatsoever over foreign migration into the U.S. or over the division of employment gains between the foreign-born and the native-born," Burtless said. "If we want to assign responsibility for the trends described in the report, the trends were crucially determined by a president named Trump, not Biden."

Although Vance sought to tie Biden’s immigration policies to the gains in foreign-born employment, the data does not distinguish between recent migrants and immigrants who have been here for decades before Biden became president.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the employment levels for native-born and foreign-born people. This is where the Center for Immigration Studies got its numbers, but we looked at what the figures showed for Biden’s tenure only.

These statistics emerge from the same monthly survey that asks households about who is working, who is unemployed but looking for work and who is not currently looking for work. This survey is best known for producing the widely tracked unemployment rate, but it comes with caveats.

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Donald Trump

stated on May 16, 2019 in an immigration speech

"Only 12% of legal immigrants are selected based on skill or based on merit. In countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and others, that number is closer to 60, and even 70 and 75% in some cases."

Economists consider the household survey data inferior to the one from a different federal survey that asks businesses about the workers they employ, partly because the household survey is much smaller than the businesses survey and thus has a higher margin of error. It also isn’t adjusted for regular seasonal variations, so the data can bounce frequently.

But because the household survey is the only one that asks whether the worker is native-born or foreign-born, it’s the only way to compare patterns between these two groups.

We examined data starting in February 2021, the first full month of Biden’s presidency. And because the household survey data is not seasonally adjusted, the best way to measure from year to year is to look at the same month across different years. So, we compared February 2021 with February 2024, the most recent month for which data is available.

During that period, the native-born employment rose by almost 5.7 million workers. That was a larger increase than the 5.1 million for foreign-born workers. By this metric, about 47% of jobs created during Biden’s presidency went to foreign-born workers, not 100% as Vance said.

Economists said that if large numbers of native-born Americans were losing their jobs to foreign-born workers, it would show up in the unemployment rate. But it doesn’t.

In four of the last five months, foreign-born workers had higher unemployment rates than native-born workers.

In February 2024, the unemployment rate for native-born workers was 4%, which is low by historical standards and equal to the pre-pandemic average under Trump. The average rate during Biden’s tenure has been only slightly higher: 4.2%.

The Center for Immigration Studies report noted that the labor force participation rate for native-born Americans has fallen since 2019’s fourth quarter. But the report also found that this rate has been falling since 2000 and slowed from 2019 to 2023.

Vance said, "100% of net job creation under the Biden administration — has gone to the foreign born."

Foreign-born employment has been increasing for years, and employment growth among foreign-born workers has risen particularly fast since the pandemic. However, the data Vance points to doesn’t fully align with Biden’s presidency. 

Vance pointed to a study that showed 183,000 fewer native-born workers in the fourth quarter of 2023 compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, while foreign-born employment rose by almost 2.9 million over the same period. 

This growth in foreign-born workers includes recent migrants and foreign-born workers who have been U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents for decades, long before Biden became president. 

From Biden’s first full month in office in February 2021 to February 2024, the number of native-born workers increased by 5.7 million. That was over half of all jobs created in that period.

We rate Vance’s statement Mostly False.

CORRECTION, March 28, 2024: This story was update to clarify that Sen. J.D. Vance’s claim was on net job growth.