The Job Market Is Thawing

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.May was a good month for the American labor market. So was April, and so was March. The economy is once again adding tens of thousands of new jobs across a range of industries—just don’t call it a boom.Last year, America’s job market was trapped in what my colleague Rogé Karma described as the Big Freeze. Unemployment was low—people who wanted jobs largely had them—but finding new work was difficult: The hiring rate was as slow as it had been since the start of the pandemic. Now we’re in something like a spring thaw. Employers have added, on average, 114,000 jobs a month this year. Compared with 2025, when the average was just 10,000 a month, the number represents a notable reversal. But this is moderate growth, not a radical expansion, and hiring is just one metric of many for determining the health of the economy. Think of these changes as a cautious transition into a new phase.The great hiring slowdown of 2025 had a few possible explanations. When President Trump returned to office in January, his government immediately stepped up immigration enforcement, deporting hundreds of thousands of people over the course of the calendar year. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that net migration—that is, arrivals minus departures—was 410,000 last year, about one-fifth of what it was projected to be before Trump’s return, although the Brookings Institution estimates that the true number could be much lower. Fewer new people in the country means fewer people looking for work. That could explain why, despite the fact that fewer new jobs were being created, unemployment stayed relatively low last year: 4.3 percent. The sudden arrival and eventual retraction of aggressive new tariff policies may have also played a role in last year’s sluggish hiring numbers. Broadly, emplo