Immigrant Workers in the U.S. Labor Force
Debates about illegal immigration, border security, skill levels of workers, unemployment, job growth and competition, and entrepreneurship all rely, to some extent, on perceptions of immigrants’ role in the U.S. labor market. These views are often shaped as much by politics and emotion as by facts.
To better frame these debates, this short analysis provides data on immigrants in the labor force at the current time of slowed immigration, high unemployment, and low job growth and highlights eight industries where immigrants are especially vital.
How large a share of the labor force are they and how does that vary by particular industry? How do immigrants compare to native-born workers in their educational attainment and occupational profiles?
The answers matter because our economy is dependent on immigrant labor now and for the future. The U.S. population is aging rapidly as the baby boom cohort enters old age and retirement. As a result, the labor force will increasingly depend upon immigrants and their children to replace current workers and fill new jobs. This analysis puts a spotlight on immigrant workers to examine their basic trends in the labor force and how these workers fit into specific industries and occupations of interest.
This data analysis primarily uses the 2010 Current Population Survey (CPS) to examine workers by nativity, but also uses Census data and the American Community Survey (ACS) in Figure 1. Both the CPS and ACS questionnaires identify immigrants by their birthplace, but not by their legal status. The terms foreign-born and immigrant are used interchangeably in this analysis to refer to anyone born outside the United States who was not a citizen at birth. This population includes naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, temporary migrants (including H-1B workers and students), refugees, asylum seekers, and, to the extent to which they are counted, unauthorized immigrants.
Immigrants are a growing part of the labor force (people with a job or looking for one), and in 2010 there were 23.1 million foreign-born persons in the civilian labor force, making up 16.4 percent of the total. As the foreign-born population has grown as a share of the total population, they have grown disproportionately as a share of the labor force. In 1970, immigrants made up approximately 5 percent of the population and 5 percent of the labor force. As Figure 1 shows, their growth in the labor force began to outstrip their population growth by 1990, widening the gap between the two. By 2010, immigrants were 16 percent of the labor force, but only 13 percent of the total population.
The growth in the labor force attributable to immigrants varies in the 1995 to 2010 period. In the late 1990s, when immigration levels were quite high, immigrant workers made up 46 percent of the growth of the labor force, while native workers made up 54 percent. During the first half of the 2000s, also a period of high immigration, the immigrant contribution to the growth of the labor force was even higher, at approximately two-thirds of the total. Since then, in the second half of the 2000s, a period marked in part by the recession, immigration has slowed and the share of labor force growth due to immigrants has dipped to 42 percent of the total, closer to the level seen in the corresponding period in the 1990s. There is a strong relationship between economic growth and job growth in that immigrant newcomers are drawn to available jobs.
Measured side-by-side, foreign-born and native-born residents have different educational profiles. The largest difference is at the bottom of the spectrum: 29 percent of adult immigrants in the United States do not hold a high school diploma, a stark contrast to 7 percent in the U.S.-born population. (However, in absolute terms, they contribute an equal number.) On the other end of the scale, native- and foreign-born adults hold bachelor’s degrees at similar rates, 32 percent for those born in the United States and 30 percent for those born elsewhere. Immigrants and natives have even closer rates of graduate degree attainment, including master’s, professional, and doctoral degrees: about 11 percent each. While immigrants and natives do not differ much in their shares with a high school diploma as their highest level of attainment (24 and 31 percent, respectively), 60 percent of natives are considered middle-skilled (those with a high school diploma plus those with some college experience or an associate’s degree), while the share is nearly 20 percentage points lower for immigrants.