Jobs Americans Will Do: Just About All of Them
By Jason Richwine on April 21, 2025
If “immigrants do jobs that Americans won't do”, there should be occupations in which the workers are overwhelmingly foreign-born. However, among hundreds of occupations identified by the Census Bureau, natives outnumber immigrants in all but a handful, and in none of them do illegal immigrants constitute a majority. The willingness of natives to work a broad range of jobs is even more apparent in low-immigration localities. “There are jobs Americans won’t do” is clearly not a strong argument for immigration.
Overall findings:
Of the 525 civilian occupations identified in Census Bureau data, only five are majority immigrant (either legal or illegal) — with just one, “manicurists and pedicurists”, exceeding 60 percent.
The five majority-immigrant occupations account for only 0.6 percent of the civilian U.S. workforce. Moreover, native-born Americans still comprise 40 percent of workers in these occupations.
Many occupations often thought to be overwhelmingly foreign-born are in fact majority native-born:
Maids and housekeepers: 51 percent native
Construction laborers: 61 percent native
Home health aides: 61 percent native
Landscaping workers: 66 percent native
Janitors: 71 percent native
https://cis.org/Report/Jobs-Americans-Will-Do-Just-About-All-Them
