A primer for journalists covering immigrant workers in the U.S.

Among the more than 50 executive orders President Donald Trump signed during the first three weeks of his second term are at least a dozen aimed at curbing both authorized and unauthorized immigration.

These include temporarily suspending refugee arrivals, redefining birthright citizenship, and continuing the construction of a wall on the southern U.S. border, according to a rundown of the orders compiled by the Associated Press. Federal courts have delayed some of Trump’s most sweeping executive orders, including the order attempting to restrict birthright citizenship.

One reason Trump has said he wants to limit immigration is to improve labor market conditions.

For example, at various times since his political rise nearly a decade ago, he has claimed that workers who immigrate illegally take jobs from U.S. citizens, take outsized advantage of public benefits and are “treated better than our vets.”

We’re breaking down recent data and academic research to answer key questions about foreign-born workers, both authorized and unauthorized, and support newsroom coverage of Trump’s policies related to immigrants in the U.S. labor market.

Keep reading to find out:

Late last year, the nonprofit criminal justice-focused newsroom The Marshall Project fact checked thousands of Trump’s claims about unauthorized immigrants, including their effects on the U.S. labor market and government spending. Here’s what they found, including, for example, that “While it’s true many undocumented people make use of public benefits, their monetary contribution to the country likely exceeds the cost of the benefits they consume, and they do not receive more benefits than citizens who are veterans.”

What is a “foreign-born” worker?
How many foreign-born workers are in the U.S. labor market?
How do foreign-born workers enter the U.S. and what types of work visas are available?
Which industries would be most affected by a shortage of immigrant workers?
Do unauthorized immigrants affect the employment of U.S. citizens?

What is a “foreign-born” worker?

There are millions of foreign-born workers in the U.S., employed across all industries and representing many socioeconomic groups.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the federal agency responsible for producing much of the U.S. labor market data that journalists and policy makers use, foreign-born workers “reside in the United States but were not U.S. citizens at birth.”

This includes people with legal immigration or temporary worker or student status, along with undocumented workers, refugees and naturalized citizens.

“Native-born” workers are those born in the U.S. or those born abroad who have at least one U.S. citizen parent. Native-born workers also include those born in an outlying area that conveys U.S. citizenship at birth: Puerto Rico, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands or the U.S. Virgin Islands.

People born in American Samoa are U.S. nationals, meaning they can work and live in the U.S., but they are not citizens and are considered “foreign born” in the BLS data. The BLS data is based on the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau for BLS.

How many foreign-born workers are there in the U.S.?

About 20% of workers in the U.S. are considered foreign born — 33 million out of a total labor force of 170 million as of January 2025.

That reflects a steady upward trend, with the percentage of foreign-born workers rising more than four percentage points since 2007.

What types of work authorizations does the U.S. government provide?

Non-citizens working legally in the U.S. need a visa administered through U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

Employers typically file visa petitions for employees.

There are dozens of visa types, but broadly there are immigrant or non-immigrant visas.

Non-immigrant visas are temporary and last anywhere from several weeks to several years, depending on the type of work.

Visas can typically be extended, though there is often a cap on the total length of stay, after which the worker has to return for a period to their home country. Small percentages of non-immigrant visa holders overstay their authorized admission periods.

According to the most recent estimates available from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there was an overstay rate of 1.45% — about 565,000 people — for federal fiscal year 2023, which ran from October 2022 to September 2023.

This October 2024 report from the Congressional Research Service provides the initial duration of stay for the more than 80 types of non-immigrant visas. A few examples:

A religious worker, such as a minister, can initially stay for up to 30 days with an R-1 visa.
A temporary agricultural worker in the U.S. with an H-2A visa can initially stay up to one year.
A temporary worker in a professional specialty occupation can initially stay up to three years, or up to five years if hired to do research and development at the Department of Defense, with an H-1B visa.
A journalist for a foreign news outlet with an I visa can stay for the duration of their employment.

Immigrant visas are for workers planning to stay in the U.S. permanently. These workers become lawful permanent residents, or green card holders. Highly specialized or skilled workers are often those admitted under those visas for employment reasons.

From 2014 to 2023, the U.S. granted lawful permanent resident status to about 1 million foreign nationals per year, on average. This November 2024 report from the Congressional Research Service provides an extensive overview of permanent legal immigration.

About 77% of foreign-born people living in the U.S. are in the country legally, according to a report from the Pew Research Center updated in January 2025. There were about 22.2 million foreign-born people working legally in the U.S. in 2022, compared with about 8.3 million unauthorized workers, according to Pew.

The number of unauthorized workers is nearly unchanged since 2007, with their share of the labor force falling from 5.4% that year to 4.8% in 2022, according to Pew. Data on where people attempt to enter the U.S. without legal documentation is available from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

In 2024, there were 2.9 million encounters, with patrol agents field officers apprehending, expelling or denying entry to people trying to enter or already in the country. Most encounters — 2.1 million — occurred at the southwest land border.

What data on unemployment, demographics and earnings are available for foreign-born workers?

Unemployment rates for native-born and foreign-born workers are usually not far off from one another. In January, the unemployment rate for U.S.-born workers was 4.3% compared with 4.6% for foreign-born workers. The rates fluctuate over time, with unemployment rates for native-born workers spiking higher than for those of foreign-born workers during recent recessions.

The labor force participation rate is another concept that can be useful to know when reporting on foreign-born workers. Someone is considered to be a labor force participant if they have a job or are unemployed but actively looking for work.

The biggest reason people do not participate in the labor force is that they are retired. Other reasons include school attendance, illness or disability, or responsibilities at home such as taking care of children or older relatives.

The labor force participation rate for foreign-born men was about 76% in January, compared with about 66% for native-born men. Native-born women participate at a rate of about 58%, compared with 56% for foreign-born women.

In 2024, foreign-born, full-time workers earned a median of $1,001 per week, compared with $1,190 for native-born full-time workers.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s FRED database is a quick and easy way for journalists on deadline to find information about immigrant workers. FRED pulls data from hundreds of thousands of sources, including the Current Population Survey and the Current Employment Survey.

Reach out to government or academic economists who study immigration and workforce issues for help understanding the best data to use for your story.

“If you want to know something about what’s happening to recent immigrants specifically, I think the [Current Population Survey] — if you want to have very recent data — the CPS is the best data source,” says Alexander Bick, a senior economic policy advisor with the St. Louis Fed.

For slightly older data with a larger sample size, turn to the American Community Survey, also administered by the Census Bureau, Bick says.

“Just be mindful of the limitations and the strengths of different data,” he adds. “And understand it’s complicated.”

Learn more about immigration data and the U.S. labor force in these recent analyses by Bick:

What types of jobs do foreign-born workers have?

In 2023, the most recent year of data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers were more likely than native-born workers to be employed in service jobs, such as food preparation, as well as in building maintenance, construction and transportation. They’re less likely than native-born workers to be employed in management and professional occupations, particularly in fields such as health care or law.

One exception is the proportion of foreign-born workers in computer-related occupations, where they hold an edge at 5.8% compared with 3.6% of native-born workers.

Here are a few more examples from the BLS data, with the percentage of total foreign-born and native-born workers employed in major occupational categories:

Look at minor occupational categories to understand what’s driving discrepancies in employment between foreign- and native-born workers within major categories.

For example, within “service occupations,” 7.4% of foreign-born workers are in “building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations,” compared with 2.5% of native-born workers.

And 6.6% of foreign-born workers are in “food preparation and service related occupations,” compared with 4.7% of native-born workers.

What data is available on unauthorized workers?

It is difficult for academic researchers and government officials to gather data on people who are unauthorized to be in the U.S. because they are often reticent to share information about themselves due to their legal status.

Take the Current Population Survey, the monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau, as an example. The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses this survey to produce a range of up-to-date information on the economy.

“Imagine you have a family member with you that they recently immigrated with uncertainty about their status,” says Bick. “You might be reluctant to report that person. You might not say that this person is currently living with you in that household. You might not even be willing to open the door.”

While the Census Bureau collects data on foreign-born people living and working in the U.S., it does not provide data specifically for unauthorized workers.

But the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, in collaboration with demographer Jennifer Van Hook at The Pennsylvania State University, has analyzed Census data to provide estimates of industries in which the largest shares of unauthorized workers are employed, along with other characteristics.

Using data covering 2015 to 2019, MPI estimates 21% of unauthorized workers are employed in construction. Another 16% are in accommodation and food services, 10% in manufacturing and 8% in retail trade, according to the MPI analysis.

And 14% worked in a very broad category called “professional, scientific, management, administrative, and waste management services,” which includes tax preparers, architects, landscapers and trash collectors, among others.

Van Hook suggests it can be helpful for journalists to provide context by comparing estimates on unauthorized workers by industry with overall shares of employment.

For example, for the 2015 to 2019 period, there were more than 10 million people working in construction out of a total labor force of 155 million people, meaning about 7% of the labor force held construction jobs.

And that means unauthorized workers were about 3 times as likely to work in construction as everyone in the labor force. More from MPI:

IPUMS USA, originally the “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series” housed at the University of Minnesota, harmonizes Census and other survey data back to 1850 and can be a valuable resource for journalists reporting on labor markets and demographic change.

While there is no indication that recent labor market data or Census data will not be publicly available in the future, the second Trump administration has scrubbed health data from government websites — so it’s important for journalists to know other ways to access government data of all types, such as from IPUMS.

Reach out to IPUMS staff with questions on using the data they make freely available.

How do unauthorized workers affect the jobs of native-born people?

While it is difficult for researchers to study undocumented workers because they are difficult to gather data on, there are a few papers on how unauthorized workers, and immigrants in general, may affect the employment of native-born people.

A 2019 paper in The Review of Regional Studies examined state-level estimates of undocumented populations and native-born employment from 1994 to 2009.

Data for metropolitan areas would allow for a clearer understanding of local labor markets, but data doesn’t exist that would allow for local estimates of undocumented populations, the authors note.

The authors hypothesized that increases in immigrant populations would increase the supply of low-skill workers, pushing low-skill native-born workers out of the labor force.

They identify a small but statistically significant relationship between larger foreign-born populations and lower labor force participation for low-skill native-born workers.

A December 2016 blog post from the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes “low-skill” jobs as those that “typically require less than a month of on-the-job training, no previous work experience, and no more than a high school diploma.” Several journalists in recent years have written that calling this type of work “low-skill” fails to acknowledge the unique and demanding skills required to work, for example, in food service. While economic researchers have historically used it as a shorthand to describe the education and experience levels needed to compete for certain jobs, BLS appears to have moved away from extensively using the phrase. The last known mention of it within a BLS product was this March 2024 manual.

When the authors remove the undocumented population from the data, the results become statistically insignificant, “suggesting that undocumented immigrants play some role in these relationships.”

The authors stress that policymakers often lean on anecdotal research that is not rigorous enough to support policy changes. They write:

“Due to data paucity, the majority of policymakers leverage often-anecdotal research that is not as rigorously quantitative as the issue requires to support their policies. The present approach contains admitted weaknesses, yet provides objective evidence on a previously understudied immigrant population to begin to answer a complex and polarizing set of set of questions. The fact that undocumented immigrants appear to have at best a minor impact on key native-born labor outcomes is revealing.

Journalists should remember that their coverage of the foreign-born workforce, and unauthorized workers in particular, does not have to be framed by politicians. If a political leader claims immigrants are taking Americans’ jobs, for example, it’s worthwhile to note research like the above showing minor effects, along with studies revealing the economic benefits of immigration.

A November 2017 study in Regional Science and Urban Economics finds that unauthorized workers contribute in a “substantial” way to the U.S. economy, accounting for about 3% of annual gross domestic product, or $6 trillion over a decadelong period.

If all unauthorized workers were suddenly removed from the labor force, “the largest losses in dollars would take place in manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, finance and leisure and hospitality,” the authors write. “Likewise we also find large differences across states that largely reflect the employment shares of unauthorized workers in each state, along with the state’s industry specialization.”

Finally, a July 2024 report from the Congressional Budget Office investigates the effects of immigration on federal revenues, spending and other macroeconomic indicators. Based on immigration trends before 2020, the office would have projected net immigration of about 200,000 people per year, according to the report.

Instead, because of recent increases in immigration, the office estimates a net increase of about 8.7 million immigrants from 2021 to 2026, or an average of about 1.5 million per year.

The report estimates that from 2024 to 2034, GDP will grow by $8.9 trillion because of new immigration, and $1.2 trillion will be added to the federal revenue.

After incorporating spending on things like federal benefits and other factors, the immigration surge is estimated to reduce federal budget deficits by $900 million, according to the CBO.

“Individual income taxes and payroll taxes paid by immigrants who are part of the surge are responsible for most of the effects on revenues,” according to the report. “In addition, the surge is projected to boost economic activity and, in turn, tax revenues.”

A primer for journalists covering immigrant workers in the US