Stephen Miller, the White House homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff for policy, claimed on April 6 that job creation recorded under former President Joe Biden all went to foreign-born workers, leaving native-born workers without any job gains. “During Joe Biden’s Administration US-born Americans gained zero net jobs in four years,” Miller tweeted. “All jobs gains for foreign workers. For American workers, the Biden years were a depression.”
Miller’s claim is not a new one. During the Republican National Convention in July 2024, President Donald Trump made a similar claim in his 90-minute address. “Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken,” Trump said. “By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? 107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”
Neither assertion is true. Isaac Saul, an independent journalist and author of the Tangle newsletter, responded to Miller on X and noted that a July 2024 Forbes article had debunked Trump’s RNC speech claim. “The data do not support Trump’s contention, instead showing that 59% of employment growth under Biden was for U.S.-born workers,” Stuart Anderson, a Forbes senior contributor and executive director of the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy, wrote. “As for employment growth for foreign-born workers during the Biden administration, government statistics do not measure how many lacked legal status.”
When measured through January 2025, the end of the Biden administration, the trend holds. Federal Reserve Economic Data collected from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that both foreign-born workers and native-born workers saw job growth over the four years of the Biden administration. Between January 2021 and January 2025, foreign-born workers’ employment level—the number of individuals employed—increased by about 6.5 million jobs, a 25.5 percent increase, while the employment level for native-born workers rose by about 7.5 million jobs, an increase of 6.1 percent. More than half of employment-level gains recorded during the Biden administration went to native-born workers. Although foreign-born workers experienced a much greater employment level percentage change than native born workers, that is mainly because the foreign-born workforce is considerably smaller, so marginal gains appear larger in proportion.
For example, if a single additional job were added to both foreign-born and native-born employment levels, the percent increase would be relatively higher for the foreign-born employment level than the percent increase for native-born jobs, even though both categories saw only one additional job.
When asked about Miller’s claim, a White House official shared with The Dispatch Fact Check an X post from Heritage Foundation research fellow E.J. Antoni that featured a chart tracking native-born and foreign-born employment levels since 2010. “As economist E.J. Antoni clearly depicted, there were roughly the same number of native-born Americans working in early January as before the 2020 pandemic,” the White House official said, “with all net job growth going to foreign-born workers whose employment is up by almost 5 million.”
The Dispatch Fact Check has previously reported on how pandemic-induced job losses had not fully recovered when Biden took office, meaning that his administration’s “employment growth numbers benefit from the fact that he took over as president when employment was in a deep but temporary valley.” However, in his X post, Miller wrote that there was no native-born job creation “during Joe Biden’s administration.” He made no mention of the COVID-19 pandemic. Measuring job creation since before the pandemic’s economic ramifications took hold shows that both categories experienced smaller employment level gains.
Still, it is not true that “all net job growth” went to foreign-born workers. From February 2020, one month before the pandemic lockdowns started, to January 2025, the foreign-born employment level increased by about 4.1 million, or 14.7 percent. Meanwhile, the native-born employment level over that same time frame added 253,000 jobs, a slight uptick of about 0.2 percent.
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