Key Takeaways
- The immigrant workforce is still growing faster than native-born population, despite a crackdown on the border and mass deportations, according to private-sector data.
- The decline of immigrant workers in official statistics may reflect the population’s fear of answering government surveys.
- Revelio Labs analyzed profiles of workers on Linkedin and other job sites, determining whether people were immigrants based on where their first job was, where they went to school, and what languages they spoke.
Immigration may be down, but it’s still powering the growth of the U.S. workforce, according to data from the private sector.
Despite President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration and a highly-publicized mass deportation campaign, the immigrant workforce is still growing at a faster rate than the native-born population, according to a recent report by Revelio Labs, a data analytics company.
Since 2021, the number of foreign-born workers has grown 4% per year, while the number of native-born workers has climbed 1.2% annually in the same period. And despite a slowdown after Trump took office in 2025, foreign-born workers continue to enter the workforce at a faster rate than their native-born counterparts.
What This Means For The Economy
If immigration hasn’t fallen as much as official statistics say, then the economy needs to create far more jobs than it currently is producing to prevent unemployment from rising.
Revelio’s data is the latest of several reports to cast doubt on a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed the immigrant workforce decreased by 2.2 million between January and July of 2025. Trump’s immigration crackdown certainly has reduced border crossings. But economists Loujaina Abdelwahed and Lisa K. Simon at Revelio, among others, doubt that millions of people disappeared in a matter of months. Instead, they speculate, many immigrants simply stopped answering government surveys.
“Many immigrants no longer feel safe sharing information with the government, leaving official data volatile and highly misleading,” they wrote.
Revelio’s data doesn’t rely on surveys, but on professional profiles on LinkedIn and other job sites that are less vulnerable to survey bias. The economists determined whether people were foreign-born based on the location of the first job, where they went to school, and the languages they speak.
If the data is accurate, it would suggest the U.S. needs to add more jobs each month to prevent the unemployment rate from rising, a point of disagreement among economists who use different assumptions about immigration levels.
Revelio says the U.S. needs to add 32,000 to 97,000 jobs each month to break even. However, economists at the American Enterprise Institute recently estimated that the figure is much lower, between 10,000 and 40,000 a month.
In August, the U.S. economy added 22,000 jobs, meaning that under Revelio’s assumptions, the job market was deteriorating, whereas it could be holding steady if the AEI’s assumptions are right.
