Opinion: Biden’s White House cherry-picks numbers to paint rosy jobs picture

The Biden administration has turned the U.S. labor market into a temporary employment agency for foreigners, leaving American workers behind, and the administration’s own data prove it. Yet instead of acknowledging this failure, the White house is taking victory laps on a few cherry-picked numbers.

The May job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a headline number of 272,000 payrolls added, and cheerleaders for the Biden administration were quick to extol this number. Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ended for the labor market last month.

Households reported a stunning drop in employment by over 400,000. Another 400,000 people gave up and left the labor force entirely. The result was an increase in the unemployment rate to 4.0 percent. That raises an important question: Why are businesses reporting more payrolls while households are reporting fewer people employed?

Part of that answer is people having to get multiple jobs to make ends meet. The runaway inflation over the last several years has caused a cost-of-living crisis, requiring many workers to supplement their income with additional work. Every time a person gets a second (or even a third) job, that increases the number of payrolls, without increasing the number of people employed.

There are also significant statistical problems today with the BLS models that estimate the number of payrolls. Some of the assumptions used in these models made sense before 2020, but not today, due to changes in the economy. The result is an artificial inflation in the headline payroll figure.

That was made clear when the bureau recently released more accurate census data for 2023 showing that about one quarter of all the jobs supposedly added last year never existed.

Statistical problems, the double counting of multiple job holders, and other factors have caused the number of payrolls to continue climbing while the number of people employed has been falling. There are now 783,000 million fewer people employed than six months ago.

But while employment is falling, more foreigners are getting jobs in America. Over the last year, employment rose 637,000 for foreign-born workers but fell 299,000 for native-born Americans. There are fewer native-born Americans employed today than before the pandemic, meaning American workers have made no progress in over four years. In fact, they’ve fallen behind.

Conversely, the employment level of foreign-born workers is not only about 3 million above its pre-pandemic level but has even returned to its pre-pandemic growth trend. It’s no wonder why Americans view the economy so unfavorably: They aren’t the ones getting jobs.

And the jobs being created aren’t good-paying, full-time work. Instead, they’re all part-time.

In the month of May, the economy shed over 600,000 full-time jobs and only added part-time ones on net. Sadly, that’s nothing new, but the continuation of a trend. Over the last 11 months, part-time work has exploded while the economy has hemorrhaged over 1.5 million full-time jobs.

But some of those who were formerly employed full-time have had to take multiple part-time jobs, being unable to find new full-time work. That has exacerbated the double counting problem for the number of payrolls and masked an indicator of impoverishment as a sign of progress.

Not only is the economy only adding part-time jobs, which are all going to foreign-born workers, but less than 13% of the metropolitan areas in the country have added jobs over the last year according to the BLS. The idea that Americans across the country are enjoying a strong labor market is completely fallacious.

The Biden administration’s disastrous open-border policies have directly contributed to the labor market chaos. The BLS admits that its foreign-born worker statistics includes people in the country illegally because neither the surveys of businesses nor of households have any questions about workers’ legal status.

It’s estimated that the flood of foreigners accounts for over half of the recent increase in payrolls.

The May jobs report shows what a disaster Bidenomics has been for the American people. They are losing their full-time jobs, and leaving the labor force, while the number of foreign-born workers in low-wage, part-time gigs skyrockets.

The economic and social policies of this White House are perhaps best summed up as “Americans need not apply.”

E.J. Antoni is a public finance economist at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Committee to Unleash Prosperity.

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