Given the restrictionist tone of the incoming administration, it is useful to look at the pinch points in the American labor market where both legal and unauthorized foreign born workers count.  I want here to look at industries not requiring a lot of formal education (such as medicine, where a quarter MDs in practice are foreign-born). I first got involved in immigration when studying and writing on injury risks of low wage immigrant workers, in about 2000.

The most obvious sectors to look at are farming and construction.  Nationwide, about 15% of the agricultural workforce are legal immigrants and 14% unauthorized. In construction, the figures are 13% and 12% (go here, and for farming indepth go here). Note that there are wide variations in estimates of the percentage of workers in an industry that is unauthorized. And, the percentages have changed over time.

The industry-wide figures don’t really help because one needs to isolate instances where foreign born labor is so critical that work will be severely disrupted and for some time for lack of replacement of labor.   In construction that might be day labor jobs in residential construction, and possibly roofing jobs.  In agriculture, the family, non-corporate diary farm industry would suffer severely because it is economically imperiled already and depends on unauthorized Hispanic workers. Also, California, the source of one third of fresh produce, has depended on foreign-born labor for 100 years. The law enforcement and employer communities there have worked out informally how to protect this workforce.

As a general rule, unauthorized workers hold non-public facing jobs – that is, they don’t work in customer service, aren’t waiters in restaurants, aren’t day care workers, in large measure due to lack of English language proficiency.  They do work in personal care. In some states like Florida and New York, well over half of personal care workers are foreign-born.

Here is one of a number of profiles you can find today about unauthorized workers.