Where would U.S. employment be without foreign workers?
Actual U.S. nonfarm payrolls, 1939–present (FRED series PAYEMS, BLS CES establishment survey), compared against a counterfactual: starting from the real Dec 2006 payroll level — the last month before BLS began separately tracking native-born vs. foreign-born employment — and adding only the growth in native-born employment (BLS Table A-7, CPS household survey) each month since.
Actual nonfarm payrolls, Jun 2026
159.0M
BLS CES establishment survey (PAYEMS)
Counterfactual level, native-born growth only
147.2M
Dec 2006 level + cumulative native-born employment gains since
Gap
+11.8M
8.0% above the counterfactual level
Actual vs. counterfactual employment level, 1939–2026
Both lines are identical through Dec 2006. After that point, the orange line stops following actual payroll growth and instead only adds however many more native-born workers were employed each month.
Actual (BLS nonfarm payrolls)
Counterfactual (native-born growth only, since Dec 2006)
How to read the counterfactual line: PAYEMS counts jobs (someone working two jobs is counted twice); Table A-7 counts people (and also picks up agricultural and self-employed workers PAYEMS doesn’t). The counterfactual isn’t a precise reconstruction of what payrolls specifically would have been — it splices a jobs-count series onto a persons-count series at the one point where they meet, to show the shape of employment growth if hiring since 2006 had drawn only from the native-born labor force. Treat the ~11.8M gap as illustrative, not a precise headcount.