Immigrant workforce reaches near record level

We’ll get a look at the June jobs numbers on Friday, but one thing is for sure: immigrants will continue to play a crucial role in the very tight labor market. The share of foreign-born workers in the United States labor force is reaching near record highs.

It’s a bit after five o’clock on a Thursday afternoon, and things are getting busy for 46-year-old Tisheeka Wallace.

Wallace is assistant manager at Pacci’s Trattoria, an Italian restaurant in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Maryland. Wallace is an immigrant — she came to the U.S. from Jamaica when she was seven. In fact, she said, about a fifth of the workers here are immigrants. They take hard-to-fill jobs, like cooks and dishwashers.

“You gotta work long hours, it’s hot sometimes … you know you deal with all the tickets coming out, all the food orders. It’s stressful,” Wallace said.

Spiro Gioldasis owns this restaurant and another in downtown Washington. He said immigrants used to make up just a sliver of his workforce.

“Five, ten years ago it was probably 5% — literally — 5, 7, 8%. Very little,” Gioldasis said.

But now he said it’s closer to 20%. I asked Wallace and Gioldasis what they would do without their immigrant dishwashers and cooks.

“I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. Because it’s hard,” Gioldasis said.

“It can be hard to find someone,” Wallace added.

The Labor Department said the share of foreign-born employees in the U.S. workforce grew from 17.4% in 2021 to about 18% last year. The immigrant workforce is getting back to pre-pandemic levels and then some, said Brad Hershbein, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

“The share of immigrants in the workforce has actually reached a near record high. And that’s almost a couple percentage points above where it was during the pandemic,” Hershbein said.

Immigrants are helping make up for a shortage of native-born workers. Baby boomers are aging out of the workforce and some people are still out because of the pandemic. There are almost two jobs for every job applicant, according to Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University.

“You need immigrants to make up that shortfall especially when demand for goods and services is so strong. So I think immigrants now are playing a maybe more critical role than 5, 10, 20 years ago,” Holzer said.

And Holzer doesn’t see that changing anytime soon as more boomers retire, shrinking the labor force even more and boosting demand for workers in some sectors, like elder care.