immigrant workforce supports millions of US
Dozens of empirical studies have found that immigration benefits American workers. Even immigrant workers with little formal education have, with some exceptions, been found to have negligible effects on the wages of similarly educated workers.
As part of Brookings Workforce of the Future initiative’s ongoing efforts to identify immigration policies that benefit American workers, we present a new perspective on the role that immigrants play in the U.S. economy. Using the “complementarity index,” we show that immigrant workers are broadly complementary to natives, both because immigrants work in occupations that serve an unusually wide range of industries, and also because immigrant-intensive occupations often complement other jobs. Acknowledging this complementarity is essential given that current trends in occupation growth imply that the immigrant workforce will become increasingly central to the U.S. economy in the coming years.
In Figure 1 each dot represents an occupation. The vertical axis measures the share of workers in that occupation that were born abroad, using Census data from 2019. The horizontal axis tracks our own “complementarity index,” which measures the extent to which each occupation complements all others. The higher the index, the more that workers in the occupation are likely to fuel demand for other jobs.
Figure 1. Immigrants and occupational complementarity
Source: Census Bureau and authors’ calculations
The logic of our complementarity index is that an occupation is considered complementary to other occupations for two reasons: first, if it is present in many industries, in effect influencing the way goods and services are produced throughout the economy; and second, if within an industry its employment share grows or shrinks in tandem with other occupations, indicating that its use is tightly linked to the use of other workers. Formally, the measure captures the share of industries in which any two occupations were both present together and simultaneously grew or shrank over time. For example, we find that the complementarity between “food and beverage serving workers” and “cooks and food preparation workers” is 0.49, a relatively high value that indicates that the two occupations were used together in 49 percent of U.S. industries and, at the same time, that their employment shares were positively correlated.
The overall complementarity index (the horizontal axis of Figure 1) is then the simple average of all these pairwise complementarities for each occupation. For instance, “Office and Administrative Support Workers” and “Financial Specialists” are two of the most complementary occupations, reflecting both their pervasiveness in the economy and the fact that any particular occupation is likely to be reliant on administrative and financial support.