The number of foreign-born U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents participating in the U.S. labor force has been higher than than native born since 2005, when the U.S. Labor Department began tracking the participation rate of foreign-born people in the U.S. Last year, 65.2 percent of foreign born people in the U.S. were working or actively looking for work, compared to 62.2 percent of native-born labor-force participants.