Will stopping immigration cause labor shortages?

Stopping immigration touches labor supply — I'll gather the latest evidence on potential shortages.

According to most economic research, stopping immigration would cause or worsen labor shortages in the U.S., especially given demographic trends.

1. Why economists predict shortages

Demographics already shrink the native workforce:

Under a zero-immigration scenario where immigration stopped for the next two decades, the U.S. working-age population would shrink 11% by 2040. And under a low-immigration scenario, the U.S. working-age population would remain relatively flat. Both these scenarios leave the working-age population at a level that our economy cannot sustain.

Increasing immigration would help prevent inflation and stabilize the workforce.

Scale of dependence:

2. Estimates of what stopping immigration would do

Economists warn the economy is already creating fewer jobs, partly because of immigration restrictions.

3. Which sectors are most affected

Tightened immigration controls are linked to growing labor shortages in sectors that rely heavily on immigrant workers, including agriculture, construction, food service, healthcare, and transportation.

Sectoral snapshots: where immigrants are concentrated
Agriculture and food production rely heavily on foreign-born labor and face major shortfalls—estimates point to hundreds of thousands of missing workers in construction and farm labor—while immigrants make up substantial shares of nurses, health aides, and other care workers

Specific estimates:

The U.S. Labor Department itself said in an Oct. 2 filing in the Federal Register: "The near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce results in significant disruptions to production costs and (threatens) the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers"

Two main mechanisms—direct removals and a chilling effect—thinned applicant pools and raised turnover in sectors reliant on immigrant labor: agriculture, construction, hospitality, and child care.

4. Do native-born workers fill the gap?

The argument for stopping immigration is that fewer immigrants will mean more jobs and higher wages for native-born workers. Some short-run wage gains for low-skill occupations are possible where immigrants are concentrated.

However, recent evidence points the other way:

Why:

5. Counter-arguments: automation and higher wages

Skeptics of the labor-shortage view argue:

In that view, stopping immigration could accelerate mechanization and force employers to raise wages and improve conditions to attract native workers, rather than creating a permanent shortage.

Most labor economists acknowledge automation is possible in the long run, but say it is incomplete and slow, and cannot quickly replace workers in care, hospitality, construction, and hand-harvest agriculture. The near-term result is still higher costs, delays, and reduced output.

Bottom line

Stopping all immigration — legal and undocumented — would almost certainly cause labor shortages under current demographic conditions, because:

Stopping only illegal immigration while maintaining or expanding legal pathways would cause smaller, more sector-specific shortages. The magnitude depends on how much legal immigration is cut, how quickly automation and wage adjustments occur, and whether native workers are willing and able to take the affected jobs — and recent data suggests they have not filled the gap when immigrant labor declined.