‘A multiple-count data felony:’ Trump administration busted for 'misleading' job claim

Trump administration officials have touted new data they say shows employment among native-born Americans has surged; economists, however, argue the administration’s interpretation is tantamount to a “multiple-count data felony,” and that the numbers simply don’t add up.

Last week, President Donald Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner after the agency published an abysmal jobs report, and in their stead, appointed E.J. Antoni to head the agency, who earlier this month touted numbers that allegedly show employment among native-born Americans were up two million over the past year, and employment among foreign-born workers fell by around 237,000.

“These charts and commentaries are a multiple-count data felony,” wrote Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute.

“The statistical agencies explicitly warn that these data are not suitable for sizing and trending the foreign-born and native-born populations. In fact, the apparent boom in native-born employment is just a statistical artifact, arising from arcane rules about how the data are constructed and population levels are determined.”

Several economists concurred with Kolko’s assessment, according to a Saturday report from The Washington Post, who cite several issues with the way the Trump administration is counting the numbers.

“If there’s a sudden drop in immigration, or if fewer foreign-born residents respond to the survey, then, by design, the number of native-born workers would almost certainly go up,” Kolko told The Washington Post. “The way the calculation is set up, it’s not like you can lower the population of foreign-born workers without raising the population of native-born.”

In essence, employment data for native- and foreign-born workers is based on the U.S. Census, conducted every ten years, and is adjusted dynamically in between census counts.

“As an extreme illustration, Kolko said that if the entire foreign-born population vanished at the end of July, this dataset would show the population of native-born residents skyrocketing by tens of millions of people,” wrote The Washington Post’s Abha Bhattarai.

Other factors economists pointed to that contributed to the job data being misleading include that fact that, outside of the U.S. Census count, much of the data is based on self-reporting, which would likely be skewed in recent months due to fears among migrants.

“If households that previously reported themselves as foreign born are now reporting themselves as native born, that means comparing statistics based on the two classifications are not comparable over time,” wrote UBS economists Jonathan Pingle and Alan Detmeister.