The United States does not need as much job creation as it has in years past, thanks in large part to the crackdown on illegal immigration, meaning that recent job growth is stronger than it might seem at first.
Employers don’t need to add payroll jobs to prevent unemployment from trending up. The economy may even be able to lose some jobs each month and still keep treading water.
That means that the recent pace of job growth, 68,000 on average over the past three months, is more than enough to stave off recession.
In other words, Friday’s job report is better than it looks at first glance.
It used to be, as recently as 2023, that more than 200,000 jobs a month were needed. But times have changed.
The U.S. has aged. Every year, more baby boomers exit the labor force into retirement, meaning they don’t need jobs and aren’t counted among the unemployed. As a result, less job growth is needed.
Even more important to the jobs outlook, though, is President Donald Trump’s closing of the southern border and ramped-up immigration law enforcement.
Those policies have stopped many migrants from coming to the U.S., and they have led others to leave. As a result, on net, more migrants appear to be leaving the U.S. than entering, a major reversal from years past.
It’s very difficult to understand just how many migrants are entering illegally, or how many then leave the U.S. But researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas combed through immigration court records and other data to arrive at an estimate. According to their calculations, more are leaving than entering — as many as 55,000 a month were leaving toward the end of 2025.
As a result, they calculate, the U.S. can lose 3,000 jobs a month and still have unemployment stay steady or trend down.
In other words, the U.S. does not need job growth at all to avoid a recession.
Those figures explain why the unemployment rate has stayed low in recent months even as job growth has sputtered.
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Separately, researchers for the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors released an estimate Thursday that the rate of jobs needed to keep unemployment constant is near zero, and below 10,000 a month.
Because jobs numbers bounce around from month to month, they added, “it would not be unusual for there to be one or more months in 2026 with declines in total payroll employment as large as 100,000 jobs,” even if the economy is performing well.
