According to Census data, immigrants made up just under 20% of Connecticut’s workforce at the end of 2023, up 2% from 2013.
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Erica Phillips to discuss her article written with Renata Daou, “Immigrants make up growing share of CT labor force,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read their story here.
WSHU: Trump's call for mass deportation has drawn cheers on the campaign trail, and a recent Connecticut Mirror voter poll found immigration a concern for Connecticut voters. Is that what prompted you and your colleague to look into census data on immigrants?
EP: Yeah, that's exactly right. I write normally about economic issues, and you know, that's also one of the top concerns of voters. And I started to see the two issues are just really closely intertwined. Immigrants largely come to the United States to work, and work propels this economy. So I was curious what the role of a growing number of immigrants would be in the Connecticut economy, where, right now, we have a ton of open positions, and we need people who are interested in working.
WSHU: What did you find? What jobs were immigrants taking, and how much of a participation in the workforce was the immigrant population?
EP: The immigrant population is taking up a growing share of the Connecticut workforce. So not necessarily replacing local workers, but more just, if you look at the overall labor force, the percentage that are immigrants has been growing, especially in the last few years. Now there's been a lot of surge of immigration in the last few years. So, that kind of makes sense. That aligns with what we're seeing. So, as more immigrants come in, there are more immigrants in the labor force, and they're taking up a larger share. That's also because there's a huge wave of retirements among native-born workers.
So if you look at this chart in our story, side by side, the populations of folks who are sort of working age 18 to 64, I believe, and then folks who are 65 and older, and the native-born population 65 and older is going up up up, while the immigrant share of eight people aged 18 to 64 is going up up up. So there's kind of these two, two dynamics happening that if you extrapolate out from that data, that chart that you're looking at, it's pretty clear that the labor force had some, some growing kind of holes in it, that new folks coming to this country are stepping into.
WSHU: Now, immigrants actually not only contribute to the workforce, but also contribute to the economy by being consumers. What did you find, as far as Connecticut is concerned, what does census data show, the linkage between the participation in the workforce and the consumption on the economic end?
EP: More people in the U.S. means more consumers, right? The United States economy is, I think it's somewhere around 70% consumer economy. That means most of the economic activity that's happening is because of stuff that we're buying and we're consuming. So you can sort of see how it would work, that if you have more people consuming things that drive growth in the economy. The economists generally see a net benefit of more immigrants to the country along three lines. One is that they participate in the labor force, which adds to the potential productivity of the economy. Two is that they consume, so they add to the output of the economy by consuming it. And three, this is a little bit more complicated. In the work that immigrants do, they're paying taxes, like any employee has to pay taxes. Still, they're often not receiving as many government benefits as a native-born person because they're not eligible for a lot of those. So if you think about sort of taxes in benefits out, it's a different equation for someone who was not born here.
WSHU: So the bottom line is that they are actually contributing more than they're taking out of the economy.
EP: That's sort of the general consensus of economists. Now, there are tons of situations where that's not the case. There are sectors of the economy where an immigrant and potentially an undocumented immigrant can offer their labor for less than the legal wage that this country requires and may, therefore, be taking work away from someone who would want to do that exact job or offer that exact service. And those situations can really hurt someone whose livelihood depends on that work being available to them. If someone comes in and charges less than what you're supposed to charge in this country, that can damage a person's livelihood. So, there are certainly cases where the economic benefits are not clear.
WSHU: What sectors are attracting more immigrants? We have a sense in much of the political discourse right now that low-skilled labor is being attracted. What did you find?
EP: So we looked at what percentage of the labor force in each industry is made up of immigrants, who are people who were not born here. They might be people who have since become citizens here, or people who are working here legally but have not yet become citizens. So the construction sector, those folks makeup, they're over-represented in the construction sector, for example. They're overrepresented in various service sectors, such as house cleaning and services inside the home. You know, personal services and health services outside the home are the largest in number, and this actually wasn't in our story, but it's the case.
When I looked at the skilled worker visa data, the largest number of immigrants are working in the health and education fields. And Connecticut is unique, the Northeast is unique in that we have actually a really strong higher education sector here, and a lot of immigrants, and specifically pretty skilled immigrants, are coming to work at higher education institutions in the Northeast. So we draw a lot of that type of immigrant labor as well.
WSHU: As a matter of fact, I saw in your story that Yale University has the largest number of employees with immigrant visas in Connecticut.
EP: Yeah, over the last decade. Plus, Yale is the top secret of H-1B visas, which are these skilled worker visas.
WSHU: You talked to some local contractors, what do they have to say about this issue?
EP: Yeah, for folks who are doing stuff like home repair, renovation, roofing, the construction sector, like I mentioned earlier, the idea that there would be a mass deportation effort is causing them some concern, some consternation, because that could affect their entire staff in some cases. And I think a lot of times, people want to distinguish between documented and undocumented labor. And I understand in a lot of cases, these may be documented. They may be undocumented. It may be a combination or what have you.
But I think there's, there's a question of, again, the reason why a construction company might have concerns is that they're not clear that all of those distinctions and clarifying of you know what someone's exact status is would be taken into account in a quote, unquote mass deportation effort. So who is really going to be sought out and detained and put into proceedings; that's not clear. So I think there is this natural kind of concern that whatever the case may be, if you say mass deportation, and I have folks working for me who were not born here, I'm worried.
WSHU: And then finally, immigrants as job creators. What did you find there?
EP: So a lot of immigrants come to the United States and have sort of a newfound freedom, the ability to start their own business, which is often something that they couldn't do in the countries that they're coming from. So there are, you know, thousands of new small businesses that are started and run by immigrants. One of the construction companies I talked to is actually his parents, who were immigrants who had started the business, and he inherited the business from them and now employs immigrant workers.
But it's an incredibly difficult thing to do, but it is, you know, small businesses are, I've written about this before, sort of the engine of the economy. Most of the labor in this country works for small businesses, and they makeup, you know, well over 90% of the businesses incorporated in the United States. So to have new folks starting new businesses and employing people, you know, that's just another way to kind of add to the economy.