Though immigration has become a flash point in American politics over the last decade, it will likely be what fuels the economy within 15 years.

That’s Julia Gelatt’s analysis, which she delivered to NACo’s Immigration Reform Task Force Feb. 13 as part of a panel discussion on the immigrant workforce.

The last decade has seen the lowest population growth since the 1930s and drops in immigration played a big part in that. Though the U.S. birth rate has already been in decline, the immigrant population was only 500,000 per year in the 2010s, compared to twice that in the 1990s. 

“Despite what we’ve heard about the border lately, the unauthorized immigrant population has been growing more slowly,” said Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “We’ve seen fewer unauthorized immigrants more recently, during the Trump administration. We saw declines in some types of immigration — there were fewer foreign students coming in, fewer refugees coming in, but again, you know people coming as permanent immigrants –  that number was fairly steady.”

But relative to the U.S. birth rate, the migration will be more consequential. 

“The Pew Research Center estimates that any future growth in our working age population will come from immigrants and their children, so immigration is going to be really key for sustaining or ideally growing our working age population,” she said. “We need more workers whose work and whose tax contributions will help support retirees.” 

Immigrants experienced higher unemployment than U.S.-born workers (16.4 percent to 14 percent) in April 2020 at peak unemployment, but in 2021 the United States was still seeing roughly 1.1 million fewer immigrants in the workforce compared to before the pandemic.

“This raises a lot of questions about how many of the U.S.-born, and also foreign-born workers, will rejoin and help to fill the labor shortages that we're seeing in some parts of the country,” she said, “and how much future immigration will also play a role in filling some of those gaps.” 

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, focused on three areas of the U.S. economy with the most job openings where immigrants play an outsized role in the labor force.

• health care and social assistance positions, where one in six workers is an immigrant (in 2019), including 38 percent of home health aides, 28 percent of surgeons and physicians, 16 percent of registered nurses and 22 percent of nursing assistants

• professional and business services 

• accommodations and food services 

“As many of you know, especially in areas in within rural counties, in rural hospitals, immigrant workers are enormously important, especially those… coming in from countries like the Philippines,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “We’ve seen how they’re really important. Processing backlogs, largely caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, have caused huge shortages and in December, it was estimated that there are 10,000 nurses who are outside of the United States whose last step needed to come to the United States and start working is just a single visa interview at a consulate. The Biden administration has begun lifting some future requirements to speed along this process.