How Did Trump Do on His Labor Day Report Card?

Spoiler alert: He flunks. But will the working class take note?

Happy Labor Day! (Well, almost.) There’s no better time to assess President Donald Trump’s labor market and labor policies in advance of November’s midterm elections.

Let’s start with the labor market. It’s shrinking, and it’s weak.

The weakness doesn’t show up in the unemployment numbers. Unemployment is 4.1 percent, almost exactly the same as in January 2025 (4.0 percent), when Trump was sworn in. Lower unemployment would be better, but most economists think you needn’t start worrying until unemployment rises above 5 percent.

The problem is job creation. It’s way down. In January 2025, the economy created 143,000 jobs, approximating the robust monthly average over the previous 12 months under President Joe Biden. By contrast, the number of jobs created in July 2026, the most recent data available, nets out below zero, which is to say the economy lost 23,000 jobs. That’s worse than the recent trend under Trump, and the recent trend has also been weak. The average number of jobs created over the previous 12 months was 34,000. Anything below 100,000 is bad.

How can unemployment be low when the economy is only barely able to create jobs? Because the number of people looking for work is shrinking. The main reasons for that are Baby Boomer retirements, which are at what demographers call “peak 65,” and a steep decline in immigration. According to the Census, immigration fell from 2.7 million in the 12 months following July 1, 2023, to 1.3 million in the 12 months following July 1, 2024, then down again to an estimated 321,000 in the 12 months following July 1, 2025.

The United States no longer wants to admit immigrants except maybe if they’re highly-educated and therefore able to put Kamala Harris voters out of work. That may qualify you for an H-1B temporary visa or an EB-1 “Einstein visa,” both of which are reserved for individuals of exceptional talent (or, in the case of fashion models, exceptional hotness; in her youth the Slovenia-born First Lady scored one of each). Otherwise, you’re probably out of luck.

Measured according to numbers (though not according to human suffering) Trump’s crackdown on immigration has been a much more significant nativist policy than Trump’s mass deportations. Trump has kept out about twice as many foreign-born people as he’s kicked out, and maybe more. The theory is that reducing the number of foreign-born workers will increase employment for native-born workers. Trump’s immigration czar, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is conducting a brutal human experiment to prove this hypothesis correct. But the findings (assuming Herr Doktor Miller ever looks at them) must be a terrible disappointment, because employment for native-born Americans has been going down.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, observed last month that since Trump took office, employment among native-born workers has fallen while employment among foreign-born workers has risen. When Trump re-entered the White House, employment for Team Furr’ner was actually lower than for Team ‘Murrcan. But Trump and Miller reversed that. During the past year employment among foreign-born workers has been higher than for native-born workers. That’s probably because the White House’s xenophobic policies increase demand for those foreign-born workers who remain in the United States (and are therefore available to perform jobs that native-born workers, it turns........

© New Republic