Employment: A jobs report filled with mixed signals
Construction and home health aide jobs are on the rise
Last week's Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report delivered a paradox: a snapshot of modest recovery layered over a sobering long-term revision. As Alicia Wallace noted on CNN.com, the data resembled "Schrödinger's cat of employment snapshots." On one hand, the U.S. added 130,000 jobs in January—well above economists' forecasts—hinting at stabilization after months of weakening signals. On the other, the BLS significantly revised downward its estimates for 2025, recasting last year as "one of the worst years ever for job creation outside of a recession," per Larry Edelman in The Boston Globe. The annual recalibration effectively erased roughly one million previously reported jobs—not because they vanished, but because, as Edelman put it, they "never existed in the first place." These adjustments reflect routine methodological updates as more complete data becomes available, not political manipulation or statistical incompetence. The bottom line: the economy added an average of just 15,000 jobs per month in 2025, far below the earlier estimate of 49,000.
Amid the gloom, a few sectors showed resilience. Vince Golle of Bloomberg highlighted that factory employment rose for the first time since late 2024, suggesting American manufacturing may finally be emerging from a prolonged slump. Combined with solid gains in construction—fueled in part by surging data center development—the goods-producing sector added 36,000 jobs in January, the strongest monthly increase since mid-2023.
Yet the overwhelming driver of January's growth was elder care. As Allie Canal reported for NBC News, roughly 124,000 of the 130,000 new jobs were in health care, predominantly in home health and personal care aide roles—not high-wage medical specialties. With the U.S. population aging, demand for long-term care is projected to climb steadily. But these direct-care positions remain physically demanding and low-paid: the median wage is $16.82 per hour, barely lifting a family of four above the federal poverty threshold of $32,150. Compounding the challenge, tightening immigration restrictions are straining a workforce already operating at capacity precisely when the nation needs it most.
This tension underscores a broader political debate. The White House has sought to frame near-zero job growth as acceptable, attributing labor market softness to sharply reduced immigration. Senior trade adviser Peter Navarro recently claimed that "all of the jobs that we were creating in the Biden years were going to illegals," asserting that "Americans were going to the unemployment lines." However, economic research consistently shows that immigrants primarily complement—not displace—native-born workers, filling essential roles in agriculture, meatpacking, construction, and health care that others are less likely to take. According to the Migration Policy Institute, nearly 40% of home health aides and 28% of personal care aides are immigrants. One recent academic study found that every additional 1,000 immigrants in a region correlates with the employment of 28 more home health aides, 49 additional nurses, and 19 more physicians—suggesting immigrant workers expand, rather than shrink, labor demand in care sectors. Like most immigrants, these individuals pay taxes and contribute to economic growth. As Paul Krugman warned in his Substack newsletter, waging political war on immigrant labor won't restore jobs for native-born Americans; it risks making them poorer—and, in care-dependent sectors, could literally shorten lives.