or just not taking the survey.
Since January, the U.S. economy has added nearly 2.5 million native-born workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
At the same time, the foreign-born workforce has shrunk by 1 million.
. . . the BLS figures are compiled from household surveys.
. . ."Where did we find 3 million more people born 16 or more years ago in the United States in just seven months?" Pingle wrote in a commentary. "Overall population growth in that time has been only 1.1 million. Clearly, creating people out of thin air or giving birth to 16-year-olds is implausible."
Pingle theorized that some people surveyed by the BLS have changed their self-reported status to native-born from foreign-born. That could be an understandable shift amid Trump's immigration crackdown.
They leave this out of their key takeaways and in the final paragraph of the article. If I was foreign-born and wasn't oblivious to the news, I would either opt not to take the survey or say I was not foreign-born. I mean, with all I read about Latino communities being almost ghost towns as far as people out-and-about on the streets for fear of being ICE'd, to believe they would tell a surveyor that they were foreign-born in anywhere near the same proportions as before all this is literally ludicrous.
That said, I'm not sure where Pingle gets his 3 million. But there is a difference between those counted as part of the workforce (which is the employed plus the jobless who have looked for work sometime in the last 4 weeks), and the total age 16+ population, which includes tens of millions (edit: actually 103.4 million /edit) who are not employed and not looking.
Not In Labor Force, age 16+: 103,443,000
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS15000000
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