Will stopping immigration cause labor shortages?

Will halting immigration squeeze the workforce? I'll pull recent research on the link to labor shortages.

Yes, most economic research and recent U.S. labor market data indicates stopping immigration would create or worsen labor shortages, particularly because of demographics and sectoral dependence.

1. Immigrants are a disproportionate share of the workforce

Without this supply, demographic trends point to contraction:

> The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that without immigration, the U.S. working-age population would have started shrinking in 2012, not 2025.
> ...without the immigration surge of 2022 to 2024, the US working-age population would have been shrinking. The prime-age labor force grew in large part because of immigration.

And: restrictive immigration policies can limit the supply of foreign workers, exacerbating labor shortages in sectors that rely heavily on immigrant labor, such as agriculture, construction, and healthcare.

2. Stopping or sharply reducing immigration is already associated with shortages

International examples show the same pattern:

> Poland and Hungary are reducing the number of non-European Union (EU) workers allowed into their labor markets, and businesses that rely on foreign labor warned that the timing could worsen worker shortages.

In countries with very low immigration and aging populations, like Japan, industries struggle to fill roles in healthcare, construction, manufacturing and agriculture despite gradually opening more pathways for foreign workers.

3. Deportations / enforcement do not free up jobs for native-born workers

A May 2026 National Bureau of Economic Research study found:

The authors concluded: "There is a common narrative out there that mass deportations will free up job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, but numerous studies, including ours, have shown that is false", because if a construction company can't find laborers, they're going to take on less work and hire fewer people overall.

> "We show that heightened ICE activity is harming the labor market overall, and we find no evidence that it is benefiting U.S.-born workers," said author Chloe East.

4. Macroeconomic consequences

5. Counter-argument

Some officials argue that native-born workers can fill gaps:

> "There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force," White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.

Vice President JD Vance has argued that limiting immigration will raise wages and create more job opportunities for U.S.-born workers.

However, most economists say that immigration is good for the U.S. economy because it helps grow the size of the labor force, boost tax revenue, and increase consumer demand, and recent research finds minimal effect on wages of U.S.-born workers, with modest negative impacts where they occur concentrated among prior immigrants and high school dropouts.

Bottom line: Stopping immigration entirely would not create a uniform shortage in every occupation, but in a labor market that already has chronic shortages in lower-paid, in-person, manual-intensive roles, and with an aging native-born population, removing the main source of working-age population growth is expected to worsen shortages, raise labor costs, slow construction and food production, and reduce overall economic output - without measurably improving employment for U.S.-born workers.