It Turns Out Biden’s Economy Wasn’t So Great For American Workers After All

American workers may not be faring as well under current labor market conditions as the Biden-Harris administration often claims.

The White House has repeatedly assured Americans that the U.S. economy has remained strong throughout President Joe Biden’s term. Despite the administration’s claims, strikingly lower-than-anticipated job creation, inflation that has often outpaced wage growth and record-setting immigration have all caused opportunities to dry up, researchers who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation explained.

“This idea that somehow this is a great labor market, which I know is something that the Biden administration keeps saying — ‘We’re handing the Trump administration a robust labor market,’ — I’m sorry, I think that the Biden administration’s own data contradicts that narrative,” EJ Antoni, a research fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, told the DCNF.

Excluding the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak, unemployment rates fell for the majority of then-President Donald Trump’s time in office — but nearing the end of Biden’s term, rates have steadily ticked upwards, from a low of 3.4% in January 2023 to 4.2% in November 2024.

The pandemic precipitated sweeping job losses nationwide in early 2020, causing the U.S. unemployment rate to peak to its highest point since the Great Depression. In the post-pandemic era, the Biden-Harris administration touted the addition of nearly 16 million jobs to the U.S economy, but failed to credit that gain to millions of Americans returning to positions lost during the pandemic.

Under the first Trump administration, the national unemployment rate fell from 4.7% when he took office in January 2017 to just 3.5% in February 2020, the month before COVID-19 hit. As COVID-19 became widespread, unemployment spiked to 14.8% in April 2020. When Biden took office in January 2021, the unemployment rate had dropped significantly to 6.4% from its peak the year prior.

While post-pandemic economic recovery has played a significant role in jobs returning to the market, it is not the only factor potentially skewing the latest employment data. Antoni also suggested that a majority of recent labor force growth has come from immigrants.

“There are actually fewer native-born Americans working today than there were before the pandemic in 2019,” Antoni told the DCNF. “So no progress in terms of native-born Americans working. All of the net job growth has gone to foreign-born workers. That’s a category that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) even admit on their website, they admit that [the] category includes an unknown number of illegal aliens. More and more job growth has gone to foreign-born workers.”

Foreign-born employment in the U.S. grew nearly 15%  from the beginning of Biden’s term to July 2024, according to an October report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. One of the largest shifts in employment was witnessed from November 2023 to November 2024, when foreign-born individuals gained approximately 400,000 jobs year-over-year, and native-born jobs vanished, leaving more than 1,000,000 fewer Americans employed from the year prior.

“We can only assume that given the huge surge in illegal aliens under the Biden administration, that a disproportionate number of the foreign workforce now includes illegal aliens,” Antoni told the DCNF.

Foreign-born workers, as defined by the BLS, include migrants residing in the U.S. both legally and illegally, refugees as well as temporary students and workers. The BLS admitted in a November news release that both its employment and unemployment surveys include “at least some” undocumented immigrants.

“I guess if you had to coin a phrase here to describe it [the labor market], it would be ‘America last,’” Antoni added.

The Biden-Harris admin oversaw the largest net migration in U.S. history, much of which was spurred by illegal immigration. The unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. increased to 11 million in 2022, according to Pew Research Center estimates, and as many as 8.3 million undocumented immigrants work in the U.S., comprising about 5.2% of the workforce, according to estimates from the Center for Migration Studies of New York.

“What we have seen with this huge influx of illegal aliens into the country has been the depressions of wages for low-skill labor,” Antoni told the DCNF. “Anytime that an American first enters the workforce, they almost always do it by low-skill labor. What you effectively do by pushing down those wages is greatly disincentivize Americans from getting their first job and cut down the first rung on the ladder of success for average Americans.”

Biden has repeatedly defended the influx of foreign-born workers, claiming that immigrants “help grow our economy and create jobs.” While this rhetoric aligns with his administration’s rosy view of the economy broadly, Antoni suggested that despite the “very positive headlines” the job market is “much more anemic than we have been led to believe.”

For instance, while the administration lauded the addition of 227,000 jobs to the U.S. economy in November, the BLS data shows that 28,000 private sector jobs disappeared that month. At the same time, the federal government continued to expand its payroll, gaining 33,000 jobs in November, according to the BLS.

The jobs report released just before the election added only 12,000 nonfarm payroll jobs, falling nearly 100,000 jobs short of economists’ predictions that 110,000 new jobs would be created.

Republican Missouri Rep. Jason Smith, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, issued a statement on Nov. 1 in response to an October 2024 BLS jobs report, slamming it as “more evidence of the stunning incompetence” of the Biden-Harris administration.

“If you look under the hood of the Biden-Harris jobs market, the facts show an ongoing struggle for blue-collar workers, a boom for bureaucrats, and paychecks that don’t pay the bills anymore,” Smith wrote in the statement.

The Biden-Harris administration overestimated nationwide employment numbers on multiple occasions. The BLS estimated in August that U.S. payrolls from April 2023 to March 2024 would likely be revised down by 818,000 — around 68,000 fewer jobs on average each month than initially projected. This would mark the largest downward revision to payroll data since 2009, Bloomberg reported. The BLS’s overly optimistic job growth expectations that failed to materialize prompted heightened concerns over the possibility of an economic slowdown.

Republican Texas Rep. Jodey Arrington, chairman of the House Budget Committee, released a statement in August criticizing the downward revisions to employment data as indicators of the economy being weaker than previously thought.

“The economy is the top issue in this presidential race and the recent downwardly revised job numbers taken together with persistently high prices and interest rates bellies a much weaker Biden-Harris economy than we were led to believe,” Arrington wrote in the statement.

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, who previously described inflation as “transitory,” also claimed in April 2024 that “real wages and household median wealth have increased since before the pandemic.” Though, for nearly two years, inflation outpaced wages for most workers during late 2021 and early 2022. Real wages in the U.S. also decreased from November 2020 to September 2024, according to data compiled by Statista.

Leading up to the 2024 presidential election, 4 in 10 voters considered the economy the most pressing issue facing the country, according to an AP VoteCast survey of over 110,000 voters. To make ends meet, 54% of Americans said that they took on a second job or side hustle to “supplement their primary income,” according to a MarketWatch survey published in August.

Ahead of Trump’s return to the White House, roughly two-thirds of American workers said they feel optimistic about the impact the upcoming Trump administration could have on their careers, a ResumeGenius survey found.

Americans have endured years of heightened inflation and elevated prices under the Biden-Harris administration. While inflation has cooled since its peak of about 9.1% in June 2022, rates remain above the Fed’s target range of 2%, and the price of everyday goods continued to rise in November.

“The long and the short of it is that workers are not making any more money, they are slightly less employed than they were, and prices seem a lot higher than they were,” Sean Higgins, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “It is not surprising that people were in an ornery mood and did not take very well to the [Biden-Harris] administration’s claim that everything was good.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.