Has Immigration Enforcement Benefitted American Workers?
Evidence from the BLS household survey suggests the answer is ‘yes’
By Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler on July 9, 2026
Expanded immigration enforcement has triggered several claims that the effort is having a “chilling effect” and imposing a “devastating toll” on the U.S. economy. In fact, data through June of 2026 shows evidence that since President Trump took office the native-born have made significant job gains. This analysis looks at native employment gains in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey, formally known as the Current Population Survey (CPS), and discusses the reweighting of the government data at the start of 2026, its impact on estimates of native employment, and limitations associated with using CPS data to measure employment trends by nativity.
Among the findings:
When 2025 and 2026 are looked at separately using within-year consistent survey weights, they show two million and 1.9 million increases, respectively, in the number of natives employed.
The within-year native employment gains in 2025 and 2026 are substantially larger than the within-year increase of 758,000 from January to December of 2024, or the 367,000 increase in 2023.
The reweighting of the data by the government in January of 2026 caused a huge 2.5 million decline in the estimated number of natives employed ─ the lar
gest decline in native employment associated with the annual reweighting of the data since 1996.
Even with the January adjustment, there were still 1.4 million more natives employed in June 2026 than in January 2025, when increased enforcement began.
In addition to the large native employment gains, the general stability in the unemployment and labor force participation rates of natives indicate that the administration’s stepped-up immigration enforcement efforts have not harmed their labor market prospects.
Estimates of employment by nativity have to be interpreted with caution due to the lack of seasonal adjustment in the available data, normal sampling variability, and the weighting scheme used in the survey, which causes a decline in the estimated immigrant population to mechanically create an estimated increase in the native population, and vice versa.
Discussion
https://cis.org/Camarota/Has-Immigration-Enforcement-Benefitted-American-Workers
