Immigration remains the driver of the US economy, even with the crackdown

Immigration may be low, but it is still supporting labor force growth in the United States, 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 U.S.-born population, according to a recent report from Revelio Labs, a data analytics firm.

Since 2021, the number of foreign-born workers has increased by 4% annually, while the number of native-born workers has increased by 1.2% annually in the same period. Despite a slowdown after Trump takes office in 2025, foreign-born workers continue to enter the labor force at a faster rate than their U.S.-born counterparts.

The Revelio data is the latest of several to cast doubt on a report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which showed the immigrant labor force fell by 2.2 million between January and July of 2025. Trump’s crackdown on immigration has certainly led to fewer border crossings. But economists Loujaina Abdel Wahed and Lisa K. Simone of Revelio, among others, suspect millions of people have disappeared in a matter of months. Instead, they expect that many immigrants have simply stopped answering government surveys.

“Many immigrants no longer feel safe sharing information with the government, leaving official data highly volatile and misleading,” they wrote.

Revelio’s data is not based on surveys, but rather on professional profiles on LinkedIn and other job sites that are less susceptible to survey bias. Economists have determined whether people are foreign-born based on the location of their first job, the school they went to, and the languages ​​they speak.

If the data is accurate, this suggests that the United States needs to add more jobs each month to keep the unemployment rate from rising. It is a point of contention among economists who use different assumptions about immigration levels.

Revelio says the United States 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 number is much lower, at between 10,000 and 40,000 per month.

In August, the US economy added 22,000 jobs, meaning that under Revelio’s assumptions, the labor market was deteriorating, whereas it could have remained flat if the US Energy Institute’s assumptions were correct.