States’ Insights Should Inform Workforce Strategies

Indiana is the ninth-largest farming state in the nation and a critical part of the country’s food supply. As a leading producer of eggs, poultry, pork, and produce, Indiana relies on a sizable workforce to maintain its supply chain. However, an aging population and changing demographics are threatening the state’s important role. Approximately one-third of Indiana’s counties are experiencing population decline, and the average age of farmers in the state is 56. This labor shortage spans industries, including health care. Nearly 40 percent of nurses are approaching retirement, and more than half of Indiana’s counties face primary care shortages. With a rapidly aging population and declining birth rate, the numbers prompt the question: how do we sustain and strengthen backbone industries?

Indiana isn’t an outlier. States, regardless of their economies, politics, or geographies, are coping with severe workforce shortages, with far-reaching impacts on daily life. Addressing these shortages requires an interconnected approach. States must invest in domestic labor pipelines; many states are doing so through approaches such as pre-apprenticeships, apprenticeships, and better connections between education and workforce systems. This is essential, but it is insufficient.

To complement these efforts, states would benefit from better connecting immigrant talent already here to good jobs that match their experience and utilize the full scope of their talents. Reforms to occupational licensing requirements, as an example, can ease barriers to skills recognition and help states meet workforce demands. In addition, practical policies to ensure that our immigration system is responsive to community needs can help solve community-wide economic and workforce challenges. And like with any widespread challenge, all of these approaches require diverse and cross-sectoral community input to work well.

WES recently held a series of conversations with business, government, and community leaders across Indiana, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Utah. They shared their experiences navigating workforce shortages and what they need to fully meet their workforce and labor needs. Despite the states’ many differences, each participant identified common and persistent challenges. These concerns were recently underscored by four governors, who launched a bipartisan immigration reform task force at the National Governors Association’s Summer Meeting, responding to the need for better immigration policies for businesses and communities alike. These governors, representing diverse states and perspectives, explicitly highlighted the need to ensure state leaders are at the table in immigration conversations, given their direct role in ensuring their states’ economies work for everyone.

The Workforce Crisis Is Structural

Leaders across states, with diverse strengths and problems, identified their state’s workforce shortage as their primary economic challenge. They agree there are not enough workers, and too many barriers to link good, in-demand jobs with skills and experience of workers, U.S.-born and immigrant alike. This isn’t a temporary issue; it is a structural challenge.

By 2031, deaths in the U.S. will outpace births. The share of Americans 65 and older increased from 12.4 percent in 2007 to 17.9 percent in 2024. It’s expected to reach 21.2 percent by 2035, leading to a dual economic challenge: declining workforce participation and a growing number of Americans needing health care and other essential services from industries already struggling to fill critical vacancies. There will continue to be an insufficient number of U.S.-born workers to fill workforce shortages.

In New Mexico, immigration is the only source of population growth, and without it, the dependency ratio, or working-age people relative to retirees, is not sustainable.

But the state and local leaders we spoke to don’t need national data to confirm what their constituents experience in everyday life, from farms without enough workers to harvest crops, to nursing homes turning away patients. What’s needed instead is a formal mechanism for states to share the impacts of labor shortages and help shape effective responses.

Recognize the Talent Already Here

States already have compelling evidence that it’s possible to begin addressing shortages by ensuring that immigrant workers are fully utilizing their skills and experience. They’ve seen the difference in their community when just one internationally trained nurse has their credentials recognized and obtains licensure to begin caring for patients. “If you help a nurse who has 20 years of training, who is now a janitor, to become a nurse again—the return on investment is huge,” one participant said. 

Licensure and credential recognition reform is already working across the states that have invested in it. More than 24 states now have an Office of New Americans or its equivalent, an approach that helps accelerate the systems change needed to better connect immigrant talent to in-demand jobs. In other states, led by community colleges or local workforce boards, cross-sector efforts include ensuring immigrants have access to apprenticeship programs or re-credentialing efforts to translate their skills and address workforce challenges faced by business and industry.

When partners get together to solve problems and listen to community needs, workforce gaps tend to narrow. Recognizing this, states are increasingly building systems that identify immigrant talent already in their communities and seeing this work as an economic imperative. Those we spoke with see these benefits in their states, from Afghan refugees in Indiana reviving a manufacturing company, to internationally trained physicians in North Carolina practicing in medically underserved communities. When people can make use of their skills and training, everyone benefits.

Build Better Immigration Pathways

Even with strong systems in place for integrating immigrant talent, the workforce math doesn’t work unless states can attract additional talent. One business leader said, “When we post a job, and there are 5,000 job vacancies around this engineering or medical field, then you get two Americans, that’s still leaving 4,998 jobs open.”

While recognizing talent already here is critical, strengthening immigration pathways to work better for communities is essential to solving demographic challenges. This requires better linkages between immigration pathway design and integration systems. Local data on workforce conditions, including existing vacancies and counties where populations are aging more rapidly, should inform pathway design to ensure that people arrive in places with in-demand jobs and with integration and workforce systems that accelerate their ability to fully contribute to the local economy.

“I would love for states that want and need more immigrant workers to be able to raise their hand and be more of a receptive state,” one participant said.

To Make Both Solutions Work, Community Input Is Essential

Throughout our conversations, state and local leaders shared their readiness to play a central role in shaping a strategic response. State and local leaders are closest to the issues, and everyone we spoke with understands what is needed to turn the tide.

Addressing urgent workforce shortages will require a coordinated approach that leverages the insights and innovations of states at the forefront. Now is the time for policymakers, employers, and community leaders to have a formal way to come together, elevate their expertise, and weave these proven approaches into national policy. Including these voices is critical to uplift sustainable workforce strategies that benefit our communities and our country.

Kit Taintor

Kit Taintor is the Head of U.S. Policy and Practice at WES.