Three months ago we were the first to point out something striking: amid all of the data massaging, goalseeking, constant downward revisions and outright manipulation, one place where the BLS has allowed a glaring data deficiency to persist, is in what will soon be a very politically charged and sensitive data series: all new US workers in recent years have been "foreign born", i.e. immigrants.
That's right: as shown in the chart below, as of April, there were 131.1 million native-born US workers, which is down more than half a million from the pre-covid peak of 131.7 million reached in October 2019 (data source: Federal Reserve). Meanwhile, if only looks at the number of foreign-born workers, here the data paints a very different picture: having peaked at 27.8 million in Feb 2019, the number of foreign-born workers has not only recovered its covid crash losses, but has increased by an additional 2.2 million to a record 30.0 million.
