Will stopping immigration cause labor shortages?

I'll gather the research on whether halting immigration creates worker shortages.

Yes, the large majority of economic research and recent empirical experience indicates stopping immigration would cause - and is already causing - labor shortages.

1. The US workforce depends on immigration for growth

The US native-born labor force is already shrinking due to demographics independent of immigration policy.

Recent analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office increased its official projections of long-run GDP growth by $7 trillion to account for an estimated increase in immigration. Conversely, the implication for the labor market is direct: without the immigration surge of 2022 to 2024, the US working-age population would have been shrinking.

2. Reduced immigration is linked to shortages in specific sectors

Immigrants are not evenly distributed across the economy. They are over-represented in labor-intensive, manual and care sectors where domestic supply pipelines are limited.

Recent research from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) challenges the narrative that reducing immigration creates more opportunities for U.S.-born workers. Instead, analyses show that declines in foreign-born labor can worsen labor shortages and increase costs, particularly in sectors heavily reliant on immigrant labor.

Specific findings:

3. What has happened when immigration actually slowed or stopped?

Net migration provides a recent natural experiment:

Evidence shows that a slowdown in immigration accounts for 40 to 60 percent of the recent drop in U.S. job growth.

NFAP projects that Trump immigration policies will reduce the U.S. workforce by 6.8 million workers by 2028 and 15.7 million by 2035, enough to lower the annual economic growth rate by almost a third.

A more controlled international experiment comes from South Korea's Employment Permit System (EPS) guest worker programme. When COVID-19 border closures halted nearly all new visa issuances in 2020 and 2021, the EPS workforce shrank by about 22 percent.

Researchers exploiting firm-size quota thresholds found:

4. Why native workers do not automatically fill the gaps - complementarity

Arguments in favor of stringent immigration rely on the faulty premise that immigrants and native-born workers compete for the same jobs as close substitutes. Economic evidence suggests the opposite. Frequently, immigrants work in jobs that are complementary to native-born workers, supporting employment for those workers rather than taking away opportunities.

Historical evidence supports this:

Similarly, removing undocumented workers from sectors such as agriculture, construction, food services, and domestic care would reduce available labor, lower production, disrupt complementary jobs held by U.S.-born workers, and raise prices in labor-intensive industries.

5. Nuance: Short-run vs long-run

In the longer run, firms can adapt through technology adoption, organizational change, and shifts in specialisation. For example, after the bracero exclusion employers adopted more labor-saving technology rather than raising domestic wages or employment.

But in the short run, abrupt restrictions on low-skilled immigration impose real disruptions that ultimately harm the workers policymakers intend to protect.

In labor market models where workers are complementary rather than substitutes, curbing immigrant labour should not be expected to raise native wages and employment, and empirical consensus has long pointed to small-to-negligible effects of immigration on average native wages.

In short, stopping immigration would not create a one-for-one transfer of jobs to native-born workers. Given an ageing native population, with the native-born workforce already in decline, it would shrink the total workforce, amplify shortages in construction, agriculture, hospitality, healthcare and home care, raise costs, and reduce GDP growth, while also reducing complementary employment for U.S.-born workers.