Immigration Crackdowns Causing Economic Pain in Mass.: Report

If all the immigrants and foreign residents in Massachusetts left the state at once, we’d have big problems. Businesses would likely be forced to relocate or shutter, and entire industries would scramble to find workers. The population would shrink by nearly a fifth overnight and there would be no one to cover the ongoing outflow of residents who leave every year to live in other states. The economy would take a big hit.

But what if the state’s immigrant population were to more gradually decline and if fewer immigrants came here over time? Signs are emerging that this process has already started, as some immigrants — even ones legally here — get caught up in immigration raids and as some are denied visas or see their once legal statuses suddenly put into legal limbo, as happened with many Haitian immigrants on Temporary Protective Status.

Now a recent report by MassINC and Boston Indicators, called "An Uncertain Future: How the Immigration Crackdown Threatens Massachusetts' Labor Force," seeks to determine how much the sweeping and overwhelming immigration policy shifts and enforcement and legal attacks are hitting the state’s economy.

On the one hand, the report finds the “slowdown in net immigration is not yet translating into a large labor market collapse” in part because many of the administration’s actions are tied up in court and immigration raids have just gotten started over the past 18 months or so, but on the other hand “small changes can compound quickly, and the medium-term outlook is considerably more concerning.”

Underscoring that latter point, the number of people moving to Massachusetts from other countries has already dropped by nearly half, according to estimates in the report. And that was just during the first six months of Trump’s second term. Nationally, the report found, after poring over Census estimates, net immigration has fallen 54% since mid-2024 to mid-2025. Immigration, according to the report, is projected to further drop nationally — by nearly 90% — later this year from levels seen two years ago when the U.S. saw a dramatic influx of refugees and asylum seekers.

All this adds up to likely bad news for Massachusetts’ economy, which would see its population — and labor pool for key industries like health care, technology and construction — decline without new immigrants, which make up roughly a quarter of the state’s workforce. In addition to providing a supply of labor, immigrants in Massachusetts have traditionally opened their wallets in ways that add to the state’s economy and tax collection. In 2024, the state’s foreign-born population was estimated to contribute about $50.5 billion “in spending power” and about $7.4 billion in state and local taxes.

In addition, if the drop in international students keeps at its current pace, the state could “lose more than $1.4 billion in economic contributions” over this year and next, finds the report.

“We have a pretty high domestic out-migration — we average about 20,000 working adults leaving Massachusetts each year,” Kimberly Goulart, a lead author of the report, told Sampan. “And so had we not had immigration, our state population probably would have declined quite a bit.”

Because Census data lags behind actual current headcounts of the state, it’s impossible to know the exact picture of the state of the foreign-born population in Massachusetts. And the report notes that currently available data does not show alarming drops numbers, possibly because of this lag in data. But, using American Community Survey data available, interviews, and other sources, Goulart and her colleagues were able to highlight some of their concerns. “We wanted to get a sense of how many immigrants we need ... each year to make sure that our labor force is not going to contract — and this is just to keep it at the same level, not even to grow."

Goulart concludes that around 64,000 immigrants are needed each year between now and the next five years to keep the labor force at the current size. That number, she said, would be needed to counteract the state’s aging population leaving the workforce and the tens of thousands exiting the state annually — sometimes for work or to avoid high housing costs. If the number of new immigrants falls below 60,000 annually, according to the report, the state will see its economy begin to shrink.

“There are a number of industries,” Goulart said, “specifically in health care and construction, that already say we have a labor shortage, so we actually need to be growing our labor force in certain industries, not necessarily keeping it at the same level.”

And the problem is not only faced by Massachusetts. Other New England states such as Maine, have a similar ripple effect on their local economies.

"I think a lot of folks share this concern in the longer term," said James Myall, a policy analyst with the Maine Center for Economic Policy. Myall said that though Maine's immigrant population is very small at just over 4%, it's still an important part of the aging state's workforce, and especially noticeable in construction and health care. Also, he said, travel from Canada is also down, and "retail sales in border towns in down" — causing a potential blow to a state dependent on tourism dollars.

While he says it's true that many of the refugees and asylum seekers who land in Maine often rely on public assistance that can put pressure on local budgets, most of those newcomers eventually get jobs and settle in, relying less an less on help -- typically at the same rates as native-born Mainers. But, he said, the long-term advantage to the state is they come to Maine at relatively young ages, going on to contribute to the tax base and economy throughout many decades.

"There is data that shows that need for assistance declines over time," he said, "it's a temporary thing."

Because Massachusetts is known for its technology and biotechnology industries and many startups, Goulart and her colleagues also looked at recent attempts to hike fees for new H-1B visa applicants to $100,000. These new fees were recently — after the report’s publication — blocked by a Massachusetts federal court but the legal fight is still ongoing as the administration recently said it would appeal the decision.

Yet, says Goulart, the mere uncertainty around the visas is becoming a turnoff for employers.

“For every H-1B visa that's denied, what are the implications of that?” She said one study found that for every one H-1B visa that’s denied, about “0.4” jobs are shipped overseas.

“Some of the biotech and life sciences companies told us that they were already thinking of transferring people to satellite offices abroad instead of even going through the process of applying and having somebody come in on a new H-1B visa, and so that's now a job that has been off-shored to a certain extent. Our estimate is quite conservative, because we only look at denials, but we anticipate that we could actually see more jobs being completely just not even opened here.”

Based on what played out during the first Trump administration, more than 7,000 H-1B visas in Massachusetts could be denied during the president’s second term, according to the report. This could lead to “nearly 3,000 jobs being off-shored, along with the salaries and economic activity they generate.”

Goulart said several companies her team spoke with said that the cost-benefit of hiring people on H-1B visas and not knowing if the immigrant workers can stay long term is just not worth it.

They say, “I'll have them maybe go to Canada or Europe or somewhere else…. The larger companies, the multinationals, they are just more likely to ship them overseas.”

Myall said this is also a problem in Maine, where "a fair number of (H-1B visa holders) are employed in health care" and take on high-level hospital jobs.