In Maine, there are plenty of lobsters, but there are also plenty of older people who are increasingly less willing and able to catch, clean and sell the crustaceans that make up the state’s $1 billion industry. In order to close the gap, companies are turning to foreigners.
“People who are born in Maine almost never look for jobs in manufacturing, especially food manufacturing,” said Ben Conniff, one of the founders of Luke’s Lobster, explaining that the processing plant staff of lobster is made up mainly of immigrants since it opened in 2013 and that foreign workers help keep “the economy going in the natural resources sector.”
Maine has the oldest population of any state in the United States, where the average age is 45.1 years. As the U.S. population ages overall, this state offers a preview of what that might look like economically and the critical role that immigrants may play in filling gaps in the labor market when they retire. the workers who were born in that place.
Nationally, immigration is expected to become an increasingly large source of new workers and economic dynamism in the coming decades.
This is a good thing at a time when gigantic influxes of immigrants that began in 2022 are straining local and state resources across the country and sparking political backlash. While this influx may pose short-term challenges, it is also boosting America’s economic potential. Today, employers are managing to hire quickly due, in part, to the incoming supply of labor. In light of the wave of newcomers, the Congressional Budget Office has already raised its economic and population growth projections for the next decade.
In Maine, companies are already beginning to look for immigrants to fill gaps in factory labor as well as skilled labor as native-born workers leave the workforce or rapidly approach retirement.
For example, state lawmakers are working to create an Office of New Americans, which is an initiative to attract and integrate immigrants into the workforce. Private companies are also focusing on this issue. In 2022, the founders of Luke’s Lobster launched an initiative called Lift All Boats to complement and diversify the rapidly aging lobster fishing industry. Its goal is to teach minorities and others outside the industry how to fish for lobster and navigate their way through the vast and complex licensing process, and regarding half of the participants have been foreigners.
In Maine, foreigners make up a smaller percentage of the population compared to the rest of the country, but this state is seeing an increase in immigration as refugees and other newcomers arrive.
That reflects a nationwide trend. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the United States added 3.3 million immigrants to its population last year and will add another 3.3 million in 2024, a significant increase from the 900,000 it used to have. the years before the pandemic.
According to a Goldman Sachs analysis, a third to half of last year’s wave of immigrants came through legal channels, with work visas or residency permits, but economists estimate that behind the wave There has also been an increase in immigrants who entered the country illegally.
Many recent immigrants have gathered in certain cities, usually for the purpose of being near other immigrants or, in some cases, because they were bussed there by Texas Governor Greg Abbott following they crossed the border. border. The cities of Miami, Denver, Chicago and New York have received large numbers of newcomers.
In that sense, current immigration is not ideal in economic terms. As they resettle in groups, immigrants do not necessarily end up in the places that most require their labor. And the fact that many do not have permission to work can make it difficult for them to adapt well to the labor market.
Nationally, even with obstacles preventing some immigrants from being hired, the recent large influx has been helping to boost job growth and accelerate the economy.
“I am confident that we would not have seen the employment recovery that we saw last year — and certainly cannot sustain it — without immigration,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project, a policy research group. economics at the Brookings Institution.
This new supply of immigrants has allowed employers to hire at a good speed without overheating the labor market. And with more people earning and spending money, the economy has been shielded from the slowdown and even recession that many economists saw as inevitable when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022 and 2023.
Ernie Tedeschi, a researcher at Yale Law School, estimates that the workforce would have declined by regarding 1.2 million people without recorded immigration from 2019 to the end of 2023 because the population is aging, but Rather, this immigration has allowed it to grow by two million.
Economists believe that in the long term, the wave of immigration might also increase the population of the US workforce even though the native population is aging, as a larger percentage of the population retires each year.
The aging of the country may eventually lead to labor shortages in some industries—such as those that have already begun to emerge in some Maine business sectors—and that will mean a smaller base of workers is paying taxes to support federal programs such as social security and Medicare.
Immigrants are typically younger than the native population and are more likely to work and have higher fertility, meaning they can help bolster the working-age population. Previous waves of immigration have already helped keep America’s median age lower and its population growing faster than it otherwise would have.
“Even influxes that were initially difficult and overwhelming had their advantages,” Tedeschi said.
In fact, immigration is regarding to become increasingly important to the United States population. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2042 all U.S. population growth will come from immigration, as deaths offset births among people born there, and the office believes that, largely due to Because immigration has increased so much, the adult American population will be 7.4 million larger in 2033 than previously expected.
According to Edelberg, immigration might help reduce the federal deficit by boosting growth and increasing the tax base of working-age people, although the impact on local and state finances is more complicated because they are responsible for services such as public education.
However, there is a lot of uncertainty. For one thing, no one knows how long the current large influx of immigration will last. Many people are driven by geopolitical instability, such as the economic crisis and crime in Venezuela, violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as humanitarian crises in other parts of Africa and the Middle East.
The Congressional Budget Office itself has based its projections on assumptions: It says immigration will decline throughout 2026 because it anticipates a slow reversion to normal, not because it is clear when or how quickly immigration will decline.
It is also possible that policies at the national level will reconfigure how many people will be able to enter the United States (and stay there).
The influx of immigrants has caused problems in many places as population growth overwhelms local support systems and causes competition for limited housing supply. As that happens, immigration becomes an increasingly critical issue and, according to Gallup polls, has risen to the top of the list of the country’s most important problems.
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