Even Trump admin wasn't prepared for what January's job market report revealed
The U.S. economy posted higher-than-expected job growth in January, with employers adding 130,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported on Wednesday. The figure blew Wall Street's expectations as economists polled by LSEG estimated only a gain of 70,000 jobs. The numbers also seemingly caught officials from President Donald Trump's administration off guard, as they had anticipated poor numbers and were prepared to explain the same to spin the poor job growth in their favor. A day before the data release, White House Counsellor for Trade and Manufacturing Peter Navarro told Fox Business that the crackdown on illegal immigration had been the cause of poor growth in the job market for January. He had even made comments on how a meagre 50,000+ increase in jobs would have been justified and positive for the economy.
As per the report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate also came in slightly lower than expectations at 4.3%, while revisions were made to the payroll numbers for the prior two months, downgrading job growth in November by 15,000 to 41,000, and December's gains were revised to 48,000, down by 2,000. This made the job growth numbers of 2025 even murkier, but the gains in January signalled a strong start for 2026.
However, it seemed like President Trump's team wasn't expecting the January numbers, which got delayed by a week due to a temporary government shutdown, to be positive. Speaking on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria, White House senior trade counsellor Navarro said Wall Street needs to adjust its job growth expectations, claiming poor job growth is a result of the crackdown on illegal immigration. “The job report’s going to come out tomorrow. We have to revise our expectations down significantly from what a monthly job number should look like,” he said on Tuesday. He claimed that the numbers won't be comparable as the Biden administration was posting six-figure growth due to illegal immigrants taking up jobs.
“When we were letting in 2 million illegal aliens…We had to produce 200,000 jobs a month for a steady state. And by the way, all of the jobs we were creating in Biden's years were going to illegals. Americans were going to the unemployment lines,” Navarro claimed, without providing evidence. “That’s totally reversed, and now 50,000 a month is going to be more like what we need," he explained. However, The Independent noted that there is no way of tracking how many newly created jobs went to unauthorized residents.
“So, Wall Street, when this stuff comes out, they can’t rain on that parade. They have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of our job market,” Navarro further claimed. The publication fact-checked the claim again, citing a CBS News report that claims only 393,000 immigrants have been arrested since Trump returned to office last year. Furthermore, the senior counsellor's claim also ignores the U.S. unemployment rate, which was at 4.6%, a four-year high, at the time of his interview. Yet, Navarro denied that he was expecting a weak number, saying, “Not expecting a weak number. I’m just saying that going forward, when we see a number under 100,000, we don’t wring our hands. We say, ‘Yeah, that’s going to be a steady state.’ So it’s all good, Maria.”
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