The first thing that changed was the count
Census Bureau figures published in January put net international migration at an estimated 321,000 by the middle of 2026, down from a peak of 2.7 million in 2024, and Brookings reads the same trend as possibly turning negative this year. The headline unemployment rate barely moved: 4.1 per cent in the latest reading. Underneath it, Mark Zandi of Moody's found that foreign-born unemployment fell below native-born unemployment in October 2025, on a twelve-month moving average of seasonally unadjusted data.[1]
A smaller immigrant labour force lowers immigrant unemployment mechanically, because the denominator shrinks along with the numerator. The rise on the native-born side needs a different explanation, and Zandi gives the plain one first: demand for labour has generally fallen, and a cohort that now makes up a larger share of the workforce absorbs more of that fall. Neither movement, on its own, tells a household whether it is better paid.[1]
Which jobs opened, and at what pay?
Foreign-born workers were more likely than native-born workers in 2025 to be in construction, trucking, natural resources, and health and personal care, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The same data show that the median weekly earnings of foreign-born full-time wage and salary workers came to 85.7 per cent of what native-born workers earned. The two findings describe the same jobs from two directions: where the vacancies were opening, and what they paid the people who had been filling them.[1]
Zandi's account of why those vacancies stayed open runs through pay and conditions rather than willingness. Native-born workers would take the jobs, he says, at much higher wages, and those wages would make the work uneconomic for the businesses doing it. He adds a second constraint that money alone does not clear: many of these jobs sit in remote places where housing and services are thin, and the skills have been held inside immigrant workforces for decades. Another reading is available and worth holding: if labour demand is falling everywhere, the vacancies may be closing rather than waiting, and the rise in native-born unemployment would then be a cyclical figure with little to do with who left.[1]
Whose pay actually rose
The White House puts the case directly. Spokesman Kush Desai says real wages in construction, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing are growing by leaps and bounds compared with overall wage growth. The New York Fed's May report supports part of that: public administration, construction and mining have seen wage growth, which the bank ties both to data-centre construction and to policy, noting that construction leans on immigrant workers. The same report finds that most industries have seen a synchronised decline in wage growth since 2022.[1]
The gains are real and they are narrow: four sectors against a general decline running since 2022. That is the distribution the headline rate hides, and this column has been here before; on 7 August a falling unemployment rate turned out to say nothing about the position of people who had lost work, because participation and temporary layoffs were moving separately underneath it. The same test applies now. If native-born unemployment keeps rising while the headline holds near 4.1 per cent, the number to watch through the rest of the year is the gap between the native-born and foreign-born rates in the monthly series. Zandi expects the policy mix to produce inflation without growth: prices rising while output does not follow.[1], [2]