Trump team already looking to spin jobs numbers by claiming deportations are reason they’ll be down
President Donald Trump’s trade adviser has been working to spin the administration’s expected low job numbers as a good thing — claiming poor job growth is evidence their immigration crackdown is working.
“The job report’s going to come out tomorrow. We have to revise our expectations down significantly from what a monthly job number should look like,” White House senior trade adviser Peter Navarro said Tuesday on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria.
Navarro said people should expect job growth in the 50,000 monthly range — as opposed to the six-figure range consistently met when former President Joe Biden was in office.
He then claimed, without providing evidence, that the significant job growth under Biden was due to illegal immigrants taking jobs from Americans, who were left filing for unemployment as a result.
“When we were letting in 2 million illegal aliens…We had to produce 200,000 jobs a month for a steady state. And by the way, all of the jobs we were creating in Biden years were going to illegals. Americans were going to the unemployment lines,” Navarro claimed. “That’s totally reversed, and now 50,000 a month is going to be more like what we need.”
While the number of unauthorized immigrants entering the U.S. reached an all-time high of 14 million in 2023, when Biden was president, there is no way of tracking how many newly created jobs went to workers who are unauthorized to be in the U.S.
“So, Wall Street, when this stuff comes out, they can’t rain on that parade. They have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of our job market,” Navarro said.
However, Navarro’s math doesn’t quite add up. About 393,000 immigrants have been arrested since Trump returned to office last year, according to a CBS News report.
Navarro’s claims also ignore the fact that the U.S. unemployment rate has hit a four-year high of 4.6 percent.
The Fox host seemed eager to agree with Navarro’s claims, but noted that it sounded like Navarro was expecting a “weak number” with the release of the jobs report Wednesday.
“No,” Navarro replied. “Not expecting a weak number. I’m just saying that going forward, when we see a number under 100,000, we don’t wring our hands. We say, ‘Yeah, that’s going to be a steady state.’ So it’s all good, Maria.”
Navarro echoed a narrative pushed by White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett.
In an interview with CNBC on Monday, Hassett said the combination of strong GDP growth and a significant decrease in the workforce “because of illegals leaving the country,” could result in lower job numbers.
“I think that you should expect slightly smaller job numbers that are consistent with high GDP growth right now,” Hassett said.
