A top Trump administration official is confirming what many conservatives have long complained of: illegal immigrants have taken a majority of new American jobs. In an interview with Breitbart News Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, economist Peter Navarro, explained that “virtually all” new jobs created under the Biden administration were taken by illegal immigrants.

“Both capital and labor are mobile,” Navarro explained, addressing how illegal immigration exploits free trade to reshape both the workforce and society. He continued, “You’re in Britain, labor is mobile, and the next thing you know, you’ve got the world coming into your factories, willing to undercut your wages by a significant amount. And soon everybody in these blue-collar English towns [is] speaking Polish and Czechoslovakian and whatever.” He added, “Immigration is fine if it benefits a country, but not if it totally destroys a country.”

“The interesting statistic here — and I was surprised that the Biden regime even published it — if you look at the net new job creation during the Biden administration, virtually all of the new jobs were taken by illegal aliens,” Navarro continued. “And virtually all of the people who lost their jobs — because it was a net-net kind of thing — were American citizens.” The economist quipped, “I mean, that is frigging insane. Disqualifying.”

Navarro’s statement has been backed up by data. According to an analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) published last month, nearly 90% of “new jobs” in the U.S. since 2020 have been taken by noncitizens. CIS found that immigrants accounted for 88% of U.S. job growth over the past four years and illegal immigrants accounted for more than half of U.S. job growth (approximately 60% of that 88%). Under the Biden administration, immigrants took nearly five million jobs, while Americans gained only 645,000. In other words, immigrants took more than seven jobs for every one gained by an American.

CIS research director Steve Camarota told The Washington Stand that he estimates illegal immigrants accounted for at least two-thirds of immigrant job growth or 77% of overall job growth in the U.S. Camarota observed, “This situation exists at a time when a near-record-share of working-age U.S.-born men are not in the labor force, particularly those without a college degree who are the most likely to compete with illegals who themselves have low levels of education.” He added, “The long-term increase in men not in the labor force is linked to profound social problems, such as crime and overdose deaths.”

In comments to TWS, E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget, clarified that the BLS report only draws a distinction between immigrants and American citizens, without actually quantifying the number of illegal immigrants who took American jobs, although even the BLS admitted that illegal immigrants did account for a portion of immigrant-based job growth. “When we look at those two data sets, what we find is that all of the net job growth since before the pandemic … all of that net job growth has been foreign-born workers,” Antoni explained. He added, “If we look at the number of native-born Americans who are employed today, that’s actually less than it was five years ago.”

Antoni continued to point out that there was significant job growth among both immigrants and American citizens early on under the Biden administration, due to the end of COVD-era closures, but that job growth among Americans quickly slowed almost to a halt.

“It’s important that we say ‘today versus before the pandemic,’ because if you look at today compared to when Biden took office, you actually see growth in both categories,” he detailed. “The reason for that is because when Biden took office, there were a lot of states — particularly blue states — who still hadn’t opened their economies yet. There was plenty of job growth among both cohorts when Biden first took office, but shortly thereafter the job growth among native-born Americans actually stopped.”

Other reports have shown that the federal government has spent over $20 billion on grants benefitting immigrants. Between 2020 and 2024, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) spent $22.6 billion, including over $10 billion in 2023 alone, on grants to help immigrants build credit, secure home and auto loans, and access Medicaid.