The bean counters in Washington just choked on their lattes. While every Beltway “expert” spent the last year predicting economic doom — recession incoming, layoffs everywhere, the sky is falling — the American labor market quietly delivered numbers so good they belong in a history textbook.
Initial claims for unemployment benefits came in at 210,000 last week. The four-week moving average? A cool 210,500. To put that in perspective, in nearly six decades of data going back to 1967, the average has only been this low about five percent of the time. That’s 170 weeks out of 3,086.
Read that again. Five percent. Ever.
The Numbers Don’t Lie — But the Media Sure Tries
Here’s where it gets fun. When you adjust for the size of today’s workforce — which is vastly larger than it was in the late ’60s — these numbers are absolutely staggering. The current four-week average sits in the bottom 1.6 percent of all readings since 1967. Compared to the number of people actually employed? The bottom 0.7 percent.
The all-time raw low was set back in 1969, when claims hit 179,000. But half the young men in the country were dodging mosquitoes in Vietnam, so the labor pool wasn’t exactly operating at full capacity. Today’s numbers, adjusted for reality, are arguably more impressive than anything LBJ or Nixon ever saw.
And continuing claims — the people still collecting after their first week of unemployment — dropped by 32,000 to 1.819 million. That’s the lowest since March 2024. Historically, continuing claims have been higher than this 83 percent of the time over the last six decades.
The Stock Market Screamed. The Job Market Shrugged.
What makes this so delicious is the backdrop. Wall Street has been doing its best impression of a roller coaster designed by a sadist. Growth slowed toward the end of last year. Gas prices ticked up. Every cable news anchor with a teleprompter warned America that the economic train was about to jump the tracks.
The American worker didn’t blink.
Layoffs — which initial claims serve as a direct proxy for — stayed at rock bottom. Employers aren’t just holding on to their people, they’re gripping them like a kid holds a balloon at a county fair.
The Immigration Factor Nobody Wants to Talk About
And here’s the part that makes the open-borders crowd absolutely miserable. Trump’s immigration crackdown and beefed-up border enforcement are a big reason employers aren’t cutting loose. Under Biden, roughly three million immigrants poured into the country each year during his final two years. That’s a firehose of cheap labor that gave companies every incentive to treat American workers like disposable plates at a barbecue.
Trump turned off the spigot. Last year, about 500,000 immigrants arrived — and so many foreigners left that the net change may have actually been a decrease of 395,000, according to a Brookings Institution estimate. When employers can’t rely on a bottomless pool of replacement workers showing up at the border, suddenly the guy already on the payroll looks a whole lot more valuable.
Funny how that works. Protect the border, protect the worker. It’s almost like someone said that at a golden escalator ride back in 2015.
Where This Goes Next
The chattering class will spend the next week trying to spin these numbers into a warning sign — “but what about next quarter?” — because admitting Trump’s economy is delivering historic job security would require a level of honesty most Beltway journalists haven’t displayed since they stopped covering Biden’s stairs incidents.
But the trajectory is clear. Workers are secure. Employers are holding. The labor market has a pulse that would make an Olympic sprinter jealous. And the policies driving it — tighter borders, fewer handouts, more accountability — are exactly what conservative economists have been screaming about for decades.
Washington got shocked by a jobs report. The rest of us just called it Tuesday.