Immigrants’ Share of the U.S. Labor Force is the Highest in 27 Years

Written by Ricky Nave in Economics

In 2022, people born outside the U.S. made up 18.1% of America’s labor force, which is the highest percentage in any year since 1996.

In fact, more than half of the 3.1 million people who joined the U.S. labor force last year were immigrants.

As a reminder, the labor force is defined as the number of U.S. residents age 16 and older who ARE NOT:

  • Serving active duty in the military,
  • In prison, jail, or another correctional institution, or
  • Living in a nursing home

And ARE either:

  • Employed, or
  • Making at least one active attempt to find a job each month.

What’s Happening to American Workers?

From 2019 to 2022, the U.S. immigrant labor force grew 5%, but the native-born labor force declined 0.5%.

Part of the reason is demographics–Americans just aren’t having enough babies. In fact, over the last 50 years, there have only been 2 years (2006 and 2007) when the U.S. birth rate exceeded the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman, which means there simply aren’t as many young native-born Americans looking for jobs as you might expect from a country with a population of 334 million.

In contrast, between July 1, 2021 and July 1, 2022, net international migration added more than one million people to the U.S. population. That means while the native-born American population shrunk from 2021-2022, the foreign-born American population grew more than 2%.

But demographics isn’t the whole story. There’s also a stark difference in willingness to work.

In 2022, the labor force participation rate of native-born Americans was 61.5% versus 65.9% for foreign-born residents.

Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate20212022
Foreign-Born U.S. Residents (Legal & Illegal)64.7%65.9%
Native Born Americans61.0%61.5%

And if we look at men in particular, the difference is even larger: 66% labor force participation for native-born Americans versus 77.4% for foreign-born residents.

Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate (Men)20212022
Foreign-Born76.8%77.4%
Native Born65.8%66.0%

Immigrant Work Statistics

Roughly half of immigrant workers are Hispanic, and roughly a quarter are Asian (including Indian, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese).

Immigrants tend to work in lower-paying jobs, but there are notable exceptions to that in the tech industry, and in fact foreigners have made significant strides into white collar work recently.

Ricky Nave

In college, Ricky studied physics & math, won a prestigious research competition hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, started several small businesses including an energy chewing gum business and a computer repair business, and graduated with a thesis in algebraic topology. After graduating, Ricky attended grad school at Duke University in the mathematics PhD program where he worked on quantum algorithms & non-Euclidean geometry models for flexible proteins. He also worked in cybersecurity at Los Alamos during this time before eventually dropping out of grad school to join a startup working on formal semantic modeling for legal documents. Finally, he left that startup to start his own in the finance & crypto space. Now, he helps entrepreneurs pay less capital gains tax.

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