BOSTON — Massachusetts will need to take in at least 60,000 new immigrant arrivals every year through 2030 if it wants its labor force to survive, the Boston Foundation's research arm and the MassINC Policy Center said in a report published this week.
The number is the headline finding of "An Uncertain Future: How the Immigration Crackdown Threatens Massachusetts' Labor Force," a 30-plus-page brief from Boston Indicators and the MassINC Policy Center that lays out the economic consequences for the Commonwealth of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.
According to the report, the Massachusetts labor force is shrinking from two directions. Aging out of the workforce costs the state roughly 9,000 workers a year. Domestic outmigration — Massachusetts residents leaving for other states — costs another 20,000. To plug those losses and keep the working-age population steady, the report says the state needs about 29,000 new immigrant workers every year.
To produce those 29,000 workers — given the age structure and labor-force participation rates of recent immigrants — the report estimates Massachusetts needs about 64,000 immigrants of all ages entering annually between 2026 and 2030. The executive summary rounds that down to "at least 60,000."
"Without these newcomers, Massachusetts will face not only slower population growth, but an outright contraction in the number of working-age residents available to support the broader economy," the authors write.
The slowdown
The report lands against a sharp federal pullback in immigration. The Census Bureau estimates that net international migration to the United States fell 54 percent between mid-2024 and mid-2025, and projects it could drop nearly 90 percent from its 2024 peak by mid-2026. The Brookings Institution projects net migration could be as low as negative 925,000 in 2026 — which, if it lands, would be the first year of net out-migration the country has seen in more than half a century.
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Massachusetts has felt the slowdown directly. Net international migration to the state was 77,600 in 2024, fell to 40,200 in 2025, and is projected at 29,100 in 2026 — a drop of more than two-thirds from 2024.
The Trump crackdown
The report inventories the federal actions driving the decline: a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa applications imposed in September 2025; an expanded travel ban now covering 39 countries; new vetting on green-card, asylum, and naturalization applications; and harder citizenship-test questions.
In Massachusetts specifically, the report cites two ICE operations — Operation Patriot 1 and 2 — that resulted in nearly 3,000 arrests, many of immigrants from Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. It also notes the March 2025 ICE arrest of Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk, who held a lawful student visa, while she was walking in Somerville. After what the report describes as "a long legal battle and a traumatic experience in a detention center," Öztürk left the United States.
What's at stake
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The report identifies three Massachusetts sectors hit hardest if the immigration pipeline keeps contracting:
- Higher education and research. If international student declines continue, Massachusetts could lose more than $1.4 billion in economic contributions in 2026/27. During Trump's first term, his administration was five times more likely to deny H-1B visas to Massachusetts companies than the Biden or Obama administrations, the report says.
- Healthcare support. Roughly 40 percent of nursing-facility workers in Massachusetts are foreign-born. About 2,000 frontline workers in the state hold Haitian Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which the Trump administration tried to end last year. About 23,000 Haitians in Massachusetts now sit in legal limbo amid court challenges.
- Construction. Many immigrant construction workers in Massachusetts are in the country illegally, the report says. Homebuilders interviewed for the brief described workforce instability and project delays driven by fear of ICE activity.
The report adds that 42 percent of Massachusetts scientists surveyed by the MassINC Polling Group said researchers in their own labs had relocated to other countries over the past year as a direct result of Trump administration policies.
Foreign-born households in Massachusetts had about $50.5 billion in spending power in 2024, the report estimates, and contributed about $7.4 billion in state and local taxes and more than $23 billion in federal taxes.
The full report — "An Uncertain Future: How the Immigration Crackdown Threatens Massachusetts' Labor Force" — was published June 3 by Boston Indicators, the research center at the Boston Foundation, in partnership with the MassINC Policy Center.
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