Will stopping immigration cause labor shortages?

Stopping immigration would reshape the labor market — I'll pull current research on whether shortages would follow.

Yes, most economic and demographic research concludes stopping immigration would create or worsen labor shortages, though effects would be uneven across sectors, regions and time horizons.

1. Short answer: Yes, according to most models

> A sudden plunge in immigration reduces the labor force available to fill jobs that businesses expect to fill, which Brookings models say will dampen employment, GDP, and consumer spending and push sustainable monthly job growth well below historical norms—perhaps to 20,000–50,000 or even negative territory

Analyses of recent U.S. policy changes estimate:

> These policies, which include restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration, have reduced the labor force by an estimated 6.8 million workers by 2028, with 4 million attributed to crackdowns on undocumented immigration and 2.8 million linked to changes in legal immigration rules

A National Foundation for American Policy projection cited in coverage forecasts a 6.8 million reduction by 2028 and 15.7 million by 2035, while other estimates cite a 15 million job shrinkage by 2035.

The reason is demographic: Immigration has become the main source of labor force growth.

> immigrant workers accounted for 84.7% of labor force growth between 2019 and 2024

In 2023:
> immigrants constituted 18.6% of the U.S. civilian labor force

Federal Reserve research found the recent surge did the opposite of causing shortages:

> This flow of immigrant workers has acted as a powerful catalyst in cooling overheated labor markets and tempering wage growth across industries and states

> of immigrant workers has eased labor shortages and moderated wage growth

The Kansas City Fed found that:
> every 1.0 percentage point increase in employment growth coming from immigrant workers in an industry corresponded to a nearly 0.5 percentage point decline in job vacancy rates

Where immigrants are concentrated, reduced supply can lift wages for some low-skill occupations, but:

> Brookings and metro-level analyses emphasize that immigration historically raised both native and foreign-born employment in growing metros

2. Why shortages would occur

A. Aging and shrinking working-age population

Without immigration, natural growth cannot replace retirees. Under modeling:

> Under a zero-immigration scenario where immigration stopped for the next two decades, the U.S. working-age population would shrink 11% by 2040

The same dynamic is seen internationally:

Research notes:
> The labor market implications of this are inseparable from a longer-term demographic reality: the United States is aging, and immigrants, on average, are more likely to be of prime working age than native-born Americans

> without the immigration surge of 2022 to 2024, the US working-age population would have been shrinking

B. Sector concentration

Immigrants disproportionately fill jobs native-born workers are less likely to take or where vacancies are highest. Coverage highlights:

> This abrupt shift has slashed labor supply in sectors reliant on immigrant workers, particularly in healthcare, agriculture, construction, and technology

And:

> Tightened immigration controls are directly linked to growing labor shortages in key sectors of the U.S. economy

Other reports note acute shortages in:

> such as retail, logistics, and healthcare

> construction, health care, agriculture and tech

The U.S. Department of Labor has admitted in a filing:

> 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

3. Nuance and counter-arguments

Stopping immigration would not cause uniform shortages and some economists argue markets would adjust:

a) Wage effect: Reduced supply can increase wages for competing native workers in the short run, a point enforcement proponents emphasize. The White House has claimed real wages for U.S.-born workers increased under tighter policies.

However, broader research finds impacts are small and offset:

> low-skilled immigration had a negligible impact on the wages of native-born workers

Because:
> Immigrants generate additional product demand and therefore labor demand as well as supply...immigrants are imperfect substitutes for native-born workers

And:
> differences in language skills significantly limit competition between immigrants and nativeborn workers for jobs

b) Automation and adjustment: Some argue firms respond not by raising wages but by:

> increasing workload intensity, automation, or hiring fewer workers at the same wage rather than meaningfully raising pay

Historically, the end of the Bracero guest-worker program in 1964 did lead to automation of tomato picking, cited as evidence that cheap labor can delay mechanization:

> Some have argued that the availability of cheaper immigrant labor harms productivity by delaying automation

c) Uneven effects: Fed research emphasizes:

> immigration has uneven effects across sectors and labor markets, suggesting outcomes from increased immigration may vary by industry and location

Metro-level work shows Sun Belt and smaller metros that grew via immigration would see sharper downturns, while areas with weak demand might see smaller effects.

d) Uncertainty: Projections carry error:

> Key quantities—emigration, visa overstays, and local employment elasticities—are hard to measure in real time

4. Long-term implication

The consensus among Congressional Budget Office, Brookings and Federal Reserve researchers is that while short-run wage gains are possible in specific occupations, the net long-run effect of zero or very low immigration is a smaller, older workforce, slower GDP growth (CBO warns growth slows to 1.3% from 1.8%), higher costs for labor-intensive services, and greater fiscal pressure on retirement programs as fewer workers support more retirees.

In short, stopping immigration would likely alleviate wage competition in a few narrow niches temporarily, but would exacerbate measured labor shortages — especially in agriculture, construction, hospitality, and healthcare — and accelerate a demographic contraction of the available workforce.