CIS: There Are No Jobs Americans Won’t Do

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An Excel file with information on all occupations is available here.

Steven A. Camarota is the director of research and Karen Zeigler is a demographer at the Center. Jason Richwine, PhD, is an independent public policy analyst based in Washington, D.C., and a contributing writer at National Review.

If immigrants “do jobs that Americans won’t do”, we should be able to identify occupations in which the workers are nearly all foreign-born. However, among the 474 separate occupations defined by the Department of Commerce, we find only a handful of majority-immigrant occupations, and none completely dominated by immigrants (legal or illegal). Furthermore, in none of the 474 occupations do illegal immigrants constitute a majority of workers.

Notable findings:

• Of the 474 civilian occupations, only six are majority immigrant (legal and illegal). These six occupations account for 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Moreover, native-born Americans still comprise 46 percent of workers in these occupations.
• There are no occupations in the United States in which a majority of workers are illegal immigrants.
• Illegal immigrants work mostly in construction, cleaning, maintenance, food service, garment manufacturing, and agricultural occupations. However, the majority of workers even in these areas are either native-born or legal immigrants.
• Only 4 percent of illegal immigrants and 2 percent of all immigrants do farm work. Immigrants (legal and illegal) do make up a large share of agricultural workers — accounting for half or more of some types of farm laborers — but all agricultural workers together constitute less than 1 percent of the American work force.
• Many occupations often thought to be worked overwhelmingly by immigrants (legal and illegal) are in fact majority native-born:
  • Maids and housekeepers: 51 percent native-born
  • Taxi drivers and chauffeurs: 54 percent native-born
  • Butchers and meat processors: 64 percent native-born
  • Grounds maintenance workers: 66 percent native-born
  • Construction laborers: 65 percent native-born
  • Janitors: 73 percent native-born
• There are 65 occupations in which 25 percent or more of the workers are immigrants (legal and illegal). In these high-immigrant occupations, there are still 16.5 million natives — accounting for one out of eight natives in the labor force.
• High-immigrant occupations (25 percent or more immigrant) are primarily, but not exclusively, lower-wage jobs that require relatively little formal education.
• In high-immigrant occupations, 54 percent of the natives in those occupations have no education beyond high school, compared to 30 percent of the rest of the labor force.
• Natives tend to have high unemployment in high-immigrant occupations, averaging 9.8 percent during the 2012-2016 period, compared to 5.6 percent in the rest of the labor force. There were a total of 1.8 million unemployed native-born Americans in high-immigrant occupations.
• The stereotype that native-born workers in high-immigrant occupations are mostly older, with few young natives willing to do such work, is largely inaccurate. In fact, 34 percent of natives in high-immigrant occupations are age 30 or younger, compared to 29 percent of natives in the rest of labor force.
• Not all high-immigrant occupations are lower-skilled. For example, 38 percent of software engineers are immigrants, as are 28 percent of physicians.
• A number of politically influential groups face very little job competition from immigrants (legal and illegal). For example, only 7 percent of lawyers and judges and 7 percent of farmers and ranchers are immigrants, as are at most 9 percent of English-language reporters and correspondents.¹ Much more here.