The job market has been wobbling up and down for almost a year, and it’s likely to continue.
The US added 178,000 jobs in March after a revised 133,000 loss in February. It extends a peculiar pattern: After revisions, the US has bounced between job growth and job loss every month since last May.
That oscillation means that overall job growth has been relatively stagnant. Between last April and this March, the US has added only 152,000 jobs in total — an average of just 14,000 a month. That’s well below the 77,000 a month average over the same months of the previous year.
There’s a simple reason for that slowdown in job expansion: population growth slowed drastically last year, per the latest Census Bureau data, largely due to net immigration plunging. Slower population growth means slower labor force growth, and that means fewer jobs being added to the economy in the long run to maintain a stable unemployment rate. And that likely means more up-and-down job reports in the months to come.
Laura Ullrich, the director of economic research in North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab, said that lackluster job growth could be “the right spot” given cooler immigration and an aging population hindering labor force growth.
Seth Murray and Ivan Vidangos of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System wrote in a new article that the US could experience near-zero growth in the labor force as soon as this year, which would be “unprecedented in the United States’ recent history.” Labor force participation — the share of working-age people who are working or looking for work — dropped to 61.9% in March, a rate last seen in 2021.
Lower immigration and retiring boomers are creating a lower ‘breakeven’ job creation rate
Gregory Daco, EY’s chief economist, previously told Business Insider that an aging population and a drop in net migration have led to a lower “breakeven rate,” or the pace of job growth that keeps unemployment steady.
Experts have different estimates of what the breakeven rate is in this new low-population-growth environment. Economist Jed Kolko previously told Business Insider the US needs to create fewer than 50,000 jobs a month, down from probably about 170,000 jobs a month two years ago. Murray and Vidangos said the breakeven was 50,000 a month in late 2020, and if the labor force is basically not growing, that would translate to a breakeven rate of also near zero, lower than the past six decades.
That near-zero breakeven rate means we can expect more back-and-forth in the monthly job numbers. Murray and Vidangos said that “employment growth in any given month is almost as likely to be negative as it is to be positive” and “these negative prints of job growth could be large in any given month.”
Net international migration is cooling
The Census Bureau found that net international migration — the number of immigrants to the US minus the number of emigrants — picked back up after pandemic-era travel restrictions, peaking at 2.7 million in 2024. It then plunged to 1.3 million in 2025 and is expected to drop below the million mark this year, to about 321,000.
The Bureau said the expected large cooldown from two years ago is “caused by both a decrease in immigration and an increase in emigration.”
President Donald Trump has massively expanded Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Customs and Border Protection hiring to increase deportations, and has restricted entry from certain countries.
While the slowdown in job growth doesn’t necessarily mean unemployment will rise, it does raise questions about where the job market is going. “As you see the population changing, the number of jobs needed to maintain a steady unemployment rate is going to go down, but the question is: Is a steady unemployment rate the mark of a stable and healthy economy?” Nicole Bachaud, an economist at ZipRecruiter, said.
Bachaud said that wage growth compared to the cost of living could, for instance, be another key to a healthy economy.
“When we look ahead to the labor market of one to five years from now, it’s going to look quite different,” Bachaud said, adding that the implementation of AI in the workforce is another factor. “We need to start looking at what that measurement is going to be for success and for stability, because I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be the same way that we’ve measured in the past.”
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