Pew Research Center data confirmed that the United States is home to the highest number of immigrants in the world: an estimated 15.4%. In January 2025, study data put that percentage at 15.8%, the highest figure on record, with 53.3 million immigrants residing in the United States. Yet, by June 2025, the number had rapidly shrunk to 51.3 million, the first sharp U.S. immigrant decline since 1960.
This study will consider the U.S. industries most dependent on immigrant labor, plus immigrant worker country of origin ratios, earning, and immigrant labor shortages in light of mass deportations and a severe ICE crackdown.
Before we look at the drop in immigrant numbers and what that means for numerous industries (and the country as a whole), let’s first consider the proportionate origin of the current U.S. immigrant population.
U.S. Immigrants: Country Of Origin
Mexico (11 million) is the single largest source of U.S. immigrants: Mexicans represent 22% of the country’s immigrants, numbers substantial enough to outnumber the rest of the top five immigrant origin countries combined.
India (3.2 million) and China (3 million) each account for about 6% of the U.S. immigrant population, with other key immigrant communities including those from the Philippines (2.1 million) and Cuba (1.7 million).
Combined, Latin American immigrants comprise a majority (52% of all foreign-born residents) totaling approximately 26.7 million people.
Alongside immigrants from Mexico and Cuba, other sizable U.S.-based Latin American populations include those from El Salvador (1.6 million), Guatemala (1.4 million), the Dominican Republic (1.4 million), Colombia (1.2 million), Honduras, and Venezuela (1.1 million each).
These communities reflect a mix of long-term migration patterns with more recent immigrant surges driven by economic instability, political crises, and humanitarian exigencies.
The distribution of origin countries illustrates both historic ties to the United States and evolving global patterns, as Latin America and Asia remain leading contributors to the nation’s foreign-born growth, culture, and identity.
And in terms of the U.S. workforce, the immigrant population makes up a significant portion of many vital industries.
Immigrants in the Workforce
By looking at the immigrant proportion of all major U.S. occupations, we can see that immigrants hold a particularly strong presence in management, professional, and related occupations, accounting for 35.4% of workers.
This underscores the key role immigrants play in high-skill, knowledge-driven fields such as healthcare, engineering, education, information technology, and scientific research, sectors that rely on global talent to meet labor demand.
At the same time, immigrant workers remain essential to industries that require intensive physical labor or specialized manual skills.
They make up 22% of all service occupation workers, a broad category that includes critical food service, hospitality, personal care, and building maintenance roles.
Immigrant workers are also vital to production, transportation, and material moving. They represent 15.5% of employees keeping supply chains functioning and goods moving nationwide.
Foreign-born workers also retain a strong presence in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations, comprising 13.9% of the workforce. These jobs often involve infrastructure development, skilled trades, and essential home or facility upkeep: all of which are fields that face persistent labor shortages and rely heavily on immigrant proficiency.
Sales and office occupations, while still employing a substantial share of foreign-born workers (13.2%), feature the smallest proportion of immigrants relative to other major categories, reflecting long-standing demographic and skill differences in administrative and clerical work.
This proportional representation shows how vital immigrant participation is to every occupational group. Yet immigrants are especially critical at both ends of the labor market: the high-skill professional sector and the labor-intensive, operational backbone of the U.S. economy.
Overall, a disproportionate immigrant representation in several essential fields demonstrates how important immigrant labor is to the nation’s economic stability, workforce capacity, and long-term competitiveness.
White Collar vs Blue Collar: The Immigrant Share
Immigrants make up a large share of manual and essential jobs (particularly in blue-collar sectors) and professional or white collar roles.
Immigrants account for roughly 19% of the U.S. civilian labor force (32 million workers).
In terms of specific industry sectors, immigrants are heavily represented in essential construction (nearly 30%) and transportation/utilities (about 24.4%) blue-collar roles.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data confirms that foreign-born workers are more likely than native-born workers to be employed in service occupations, natural resources, construction, and transportation/material moving, and less likely to fill a management or professional role.
Undocumented workers fill millions of positions within emerging growth roles or in industries like healthcare, tech, and science, proving that immigrant labor is a strong feature of both blue- and white-collar jobs. That said, it’s true that immigrant work is concentrated in sectors where labor shortages already exist, a nuance that also complicates overly simplistic ‘immigrant jobs vs. native jobs’ narratives.
For a closer look at immigrant workers across multiple industries, let’s look at detailed numbers.
Immigrant Workers: Industry Share Figures
The distribution of foreign-born workers across U.S. industries highlights not only the roles immigrants fill, but also where they are key to economic stability and growth.
Construction is the most immigrant–dependent sector in the country: nearly 30% of its workforce (over 3.5 million workers) were born outside the United States. This reflects a long-standing reliance on immigrants filling both skilled and unskilled roles in an industry consistently facing labor shortages and rising demand.
A similarly strong presence can be found in transportation and utilities, where 24.4% of workers are foreign-born, underscoring immigrants’ central role in U.S. goods, services, and energy systems.
Immigrants also make up 22.8% of workers in both professional and business services and other services, showing their importance to administrative, support, and specialized service roles.
Several industries that form the backbone of the nation’s essential workforce also feature substantial immigrant representation.
21% of agricultural work, a significant portion of which involves physically demanding and seasonal work, is carried out by workers who were born outside the U.S.
Leisure and hospitality, known for its fast-paced service environment, relies on immigrants for 21.4% of its workforce. Meanwhile, manufacturing, a key driver of U.S. exports and supply chains, features 20.2% foreign-born workers, demonstrating their integral role in keeping production lines operating nationwide.
Other industries featuring significant immigrant participation include wholesale and retail trade (16.5%), financial activities (14.9%), educational and health services (14.8%), information (14.2%), and mining (14%).
Public administration features the smallest share of foreign-born workers (10.3%), a fact that reflects citizenship requirements or federal hiring structures limiting immigrant representation.
The data emphasizes the fact that immigrants sustain some of its most essential, labor-intensive, and economically influential industries in the United States. And the industries with the highest concentrations of foreign-born workers include those in which labor shortages are especially acute, a further reason to consider immigrant workers indispensable to national productivity, economic resilience, and long-term workforce stability.
Though the data tells us that immigrant workers are indispensable, it also tells us that they routinely earn far less than native workers filling the same role.
The Immigrant Weekly Earnings Shortfall
A comparison of median weekly earnings between foreign-born and native-born workers reveals a clear and persistent wage gap that cuts across both gender and occupational lines.
Overall, foreign-born workers earn $1,001 per week, while native-born workers earn $1,190, figures that mean immigrants take home only 84% of the weekly pay their native-born counterparts earn.
This gap reflects broad labor market dynamics, including differences in job types, access to higher-paying roles, credential recognition, and barriers that immigrant workers often face regarding wage progression or occupational mobility.
Among men working full time, the wage disparity is even more pronounced, with foreign-born men earning $1,077, just 82% of native-born men wages ($1,316). This suggests that foreign-born men are disproportionately consigned to physically demanding or lower-wage positions or encounter systemic barriers to advancement into higher-paying roles.
Foreign-born women also experience a notable gap compared with native-born women. Immigrant women earn a median of $911 per week, approximately 85% of native-born women earnings ($1,074).
For both men and women, the shortfall represents a substantial difference in weekly income and has long-term implications for economic security, wealth accumulation, and retirement stability.
The earnings gap highlights structural inequalities that shape the economic experiences of immigrant workers, regardless of gender. This is true across all industries, and reflects complex intersections of occupation, education, work tenure, and access.
Earnings aside, the study has already established the vital importance of immigrants to the U.S. workforce. So it’s worrying to note a significant decline in U.S. immigrant numbers.
Declining Immigrant Numbers
The sharp drop in the immigrant population between January and June 2025 (from 53.3 million to 51.3 million people) marks the first notable decline in immigration numbers since the 1960s. This reversal is especially significant because immigrants have been the main source of labor force growth for over a decade.
Research from the National Foundation for American Policy shows that over 70% of the country’s labor–force expansion since 2010 is due to foreign-born workers. This means that the U.S. economy has increasingly leaned on immigrant labor to counterbalance aging and retiring native-born workers.
A continued fall in the immigrant population could devastate industries already operating with substantial labor deficits. For example, the construction industry relies on a workforce that’s nearly 30% foreign–born, with agriculture (21.9%), transportation and utilities (24.4%), and leisure and hospitality (21.4%) all highly dependent on immigrant labor to meet ongoing demand.
With more than 10,000 Baby Boomers retiring each day, fewer immigrant workers directly translates into tighter labor markets, slower production cycles, and higher costs across the economy.
This shift signals more than a demographic change: it represents a growing risk to industries essential to national infrastructure, food systems, logistics, and daily consumer life.
The risk assessment across U.S. industries clearly indicates that a decline in immigrant labor would disproportionately affect some work sectors. Industries with the highest concentrations of foreign-born workers, like construction, transportation and utilities, agriculture, and leisure and hospitality, face the greatest risk, as they already rely heavily on immigrant labor to meet day-to-day workforce demands.
Construction, for example, comprises almost a third of immigrant workers and is already short more than 500,000 workers, while the transportation sector is grappling with an annual deficit of more than 60,000 truck drivers.
Agriculture is similarly vulnerable, with immigrants fulfilling more than half of all crop labor, meaning a further decline in workforce numbers could immediately weaken food production and national supply chains.
Medium–risk industries such as manufacturing and professional and business services also depend on immigrants to keep production, logistics, and technical roles functioning; these currently face less extreme staff shortages.
Low–risk sectors, including public administration, information, and financial activities, feature a stronger domestic labor pipeline and relatively low immigrant representation. Yet, overall, it’s clear that any sustained drop in immigrant labor would disproportionately impact critical sectors and disrupt food systems, logistics, and essential services, compounding already significant labor shortages and threatening economic stability.
And the importance of immigrants to the U.S. workforce is augmented further when we look beyond the immediate term to consider the long-term future of the U.S. labor market.
The Long-term Importance Of Immigrant Workers
Census Bureau models indicate that the native-born working-age population is expected to decline steadily through 2040, while the foreign-born population in the same age group will continue to grow.
NFAP estimates show that without immigration, the U.S. workforce would have shrunk between 2010 and 2024, a period during which immigrants accounted for roughly 70–75% of all labor-force growth.
Immigrant workers also contribute heavily to Social Security funding. The Social Security Administration reports that immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, contributed more than $520 billion to Social Security during the last decade.
Without sustained or increased immigration, the U.S. faces the following long-term risks:
- A shrinking labor pool
- Higher dependency ratios
- Reduced economic output
- Understaffing in essential and high-growth industries.
In other words, the country’s economic trajectory and its immigration levels are inextricably intertwined. Which means mass immigrant deportations in 2025 are a blow to the U.S. labor economy.
The Labor Force Impact of Immigrant Deportations
The recent ICE-led spikes in deportations and immigration enforcement directly contributed to the decline in the U.S. immigrant labor force. And this is a shift that has had tangible consequences for industries heavily reliant on foreign-born workers.
The 5 states with the highest deportation rates are Texas, Arizona, Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida.
Beyond individual roles, deportations may destabilize entire local labor markets, shrinking the available workforce while demand for essential services remains unchanged.
According to recent analysis, over 1.2 million immigrants left the U.S. labor force between January and July 2025, a drop largely attributed to intensified interior enforcement and deportations.
At the same time, research from policy analysts shows that continuously aggressive deportation policies could shrink the overall U.S. workforce by 6.8 million workers by 2028, and by 15.7 million by 2035, erasing gradual labor force gains established during decades of immigration-led growth.
Sectors already identified as highly reliant on immigrant labor (construction, agriculture, transportation, and hospitality) suffer disproportionately during any such wave of mass immigrant deportations.
And the economic fallout isn’t limited to immigrant workers. Employers and U.S.-born workers may also feel the pinch as firms struggle to replace missing workers, inadvertently lose production momentum, increase costs, and ultimately undermine industry stability.
In short, the recent ICE-led enforcement and deportation drive represents a clear threat to labor market stability. With large numbers of workers being removed (or succumbing to enforcement pressure), key sectors face perpetual disruption, the effects of which ultimately ripple through the broader economy.
Immigrants Are Key To A Healthy U.S. Economy
The study makes it clear: the United States’ economic strength is inextricably tied to immigrant labor. And the country must now confront the consequences of a rapid and historic drop in its number of foreign-born workers.
With immigrants representing 15.4% of the U.S. population and contributing more than 70% of all labor-force growth since 2010, they have become indispensable across every layer of the economy.
The latest demographic shifts show that immigrants not only form the backbone of physically demanding sectors like construction, agriculture, transportation, and hospitality, but also play essential roles in high-skill and knowledge-driven fields, including engineering, healthcare, technology, and business services.
A continued fall in the immigrant population could devastate industries already operating with substantial labor deficits
In many of the country’s most economically influential industries, immigrants comprise 20–30% of the workforce, filling positions that domestic workers either cannot meet in volume or are unwilling to fill due to physical demands, low wages, or specialized skill requirements.
Yet between January and June 2025, the foreign-born population fell by nearly 2 million people, marking the first major decline since the 1960s.
This drop is especially concerning because it coincides with a period of intense labor shortages and rapid retirements among native-born workers. A shrinking immigrant labor pool leads to slow economic output, a delay in construction timelines, destabilized supply chains, and shortfalls in food production, caregiving, transportation, and logistics.
Ultimately, immigrants are not a disposable commodity. They are fundamental to a functioning U.S. economy, now and in the future. The recent decline in immigrant labor threatens the country’s long-term competitiveness. If current patterns persist, the question is no longer whether key industries will be affected, but how soon, how severely, and at what overall cost to the United States.
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