Businesses are relying more on migrant workers as labor shortages persist, but economists warn of long-term dangers
7 min
As migration hits record levels worldwide, a debate is building among economists over whether some industries are becoming too dependent on foreign labour.
Many business owners say that bringing in low-skilled foreign workers has become essential, as local populations age and labor forces shrink. In rural Wisconsin, John Rosenow says it is impossible to find locals to work on his 1,000-acre dairy farm. He relies on 13 Mexican immigrants, up from eight to 10 a decade ago. That has enabled him to avoid making costly investments in robots that can help milk cows, as some other dairy farmers have.
“We get really good people,” Rosenow says. With immigrant labor, “I’m pretty sure if I wanted to double employment, I could get it done within a week.”
To some economists, however, dependence on imported workers is approaching unhealthy levels in some places, stifling productivity growth and helping businesses delay the search for more sustainable solutions to labor shortages.
Those solutions could include bigger investments in automation, or more radical restructurings such as business closures, which are painful but may be necessary long-term, these economists say.
“Once industry is organised in a certain way and the structure encourages employers to recruit migrants, it can be very hard to turn back,” said Martin Ruhs , a professor of migration studies in Florence, Italy. “In some cases, policymakers should ask, does it make sense?” said Ruhs, who is also a former member of the U.K. Migration Advisory Committee, which advises the British government on migration policy.
The debate is likely to heat up further as Western societies teeter closer to a demographic abyss . For the first time since World War II, the working-age population is shrinking across advanced economies. The European Union’s working-age population will shrink by one-fifth through 2050, according to a recent report by German insurer Allianz .
There are ways to offset that trend, such as encouraging older workers to delay retirement. But importing foreign labour is often the easiest option, given the supply of available workers in places such as Latin America or Africa.
Immigration also provides a rush of economic growth as migrants boost populations and spend money, even when it elicits blowback from conservative groups, as it has in the U.S. and Europe.
Immigration is now running two to three times above pre pandemic levels across major destination countries including Canada, Germany and the U.K. In the U.S., 3.3 million more migrants arrived than left last year, compared with a 2010s average of around 900,000.
Three-quarters of farmworkers and 30% of construction and mining workers in the U.S. today are migrants. Overall, immigrants made up 18% of the U.S. workforce in 2021, compared with 16% a decade earlier, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based club of mostly rich countries.
Despite promising for decades to curb immigration, the U.K. has seen a surge since its 2020 exit from the EU, as businesses scramble for employees. More than 27% of the National Health Service’s nurses are from abroad today, up from around 14% in 2013. In Germany, roughly 80% of slaughterhouse workers are migrants, unions estimate.
Increased reliance on low-skilled imported labor can lead to weaker productivity growth, which ultimately determines how fast economies can expand, some economic research suggests.
A 2022 study in Denmark found that firms with easy access to migrant workers invested less in robots. Research in Australia and Canada suggests that migrants could keep weak firms alive, weighing on overall productivity.
Labour productivity growth has been sluggish across advanced economies in recent years. In the U.S. and U.K. farming sectors, productivity has flatlined for a decade or longer. In Japan and Korea, which have more restrictive immigration policies, it increased by around 1.5% a year, OECD data show.
Finding the right balance between allowing some migration, which can help restore dynamism in aging countries, and avoiding over dependence is hard. In many industries, there is no obvious alternative to foreign workers.
Going cold turkey would send prices for products made from migrant labour higher. It would also leave many people in poorer countries with fewer options to pursue better lives.
Anna Boucher , a global migration expert at the University of Sydney, says that some low-skilled migration is probably necessary in the short term due to skills shortages. Without it, some childcare services in Australia would shut down and vegetables would die in the fields.
Economic research suggests that an influx of high-skilled migrants, such as scientists and engineers, can actually lift firms’ productivity and boost local workers’ wages and employment opportunities.
Economists are more divided when it comes to lower-skilled migrants. Such workers are also more easily replaced, including in industries that seem unlikely candidates for automation.
In the Czech Republic, some farmers are using artificial-intelligence-driven robots to monitor and harvest strawberries. Israeli startup Tevel Aerobotics Technologies has developed fruit-picking drones. Fieldwork Robotics, a U.K. company, recently started selling raspberry-picking robots, which stand 6 feet tall with four plastic arms.
Yet for governments, pursuing reforms that boost productivity and allow weaker firms to die is a lot harder than increasing immigration, said Dan Andrews , a productivity expert at the OECD.
“Some countries may have taken the easy way out,” he said.
Hoping to accelerate automation in agriculture, the U.K. government is pouring money into farm technology. It is also considering abolishing rules that allow companies to pay migrant workers 20% less than the going rate for jobs, prompting protests from farmers’ lobby groups. They say farmers adopt technology quickly if it is available, but that robots are no good at picking fruit and vegetables.
“The technology that we are aiming for is five years away…we were saying that five years ago,” said Martin Emmett , a farmer and official at the National Farmers’ Union, a trade group.
In Malaysia, the government last year announced a freeze on hiring of new foreign workers. Government ministers say that over dependence on cheap foreign labour has created a detrimental cycle that allows companies to resist innovation. Local companies say they need more time to invest in automation and upgrade workers’ skills.
Some industries, including manufacturing and plantations, have since been allowed to hire foreigners following appeals, but the broader freeze on foreign workers remains in place with no end date.
In Canada, economists say the government has cast aside a carefully managed immigration system that gave priority to highly skilled workers, and ramped up significantly the intake of foreign students and other low-skilled temporary workers. By flooding the market with cheap labor, Ottawa may be propping up uncompetitive businesses and ultimately damaging productivity, according to a December report co-written by former Canadian central-bank governor David Dodge .
Economic output per capita is lower than it was in 2018 following years of record immigration, notes Mikal Skuterud , an economist at Waterloo University in Ontario. Canada has been bringing in so many low-skilled workers that it lowers the country’s productivity overall, he says.
The debates are also intensifying in Germany, where businesses including butcher shops in the foothills of the Black Forest are becoming more reliant on imported labour.
Young people don’t want to train as butchers anymore, local businesses say, because it is unglamorous work, with low pay. Labour shortages are one reason why the number of butcher shops has roughly halved over the past two decades.
Three years ago, Handirk von Ungern-Sternberg , an official at the local chamber of handicrafts, started a pilot project to recruit butchers’ apprentices in India, taking advantage of a change in German law that made it easier to hire low-skilled workers from outside the EU. The first batch of 13 young Indians arrived in September 2022.
Now, demand is exploding. Von Ungern-Sternberg plans to bring in roughly 140 Indian workers this year. That number could triple in future, he says.
From auto mechanics to construction, local businesses are clamoring for his young Indian recruits. Chambers of handicrafts across Germany, from the Alps to the North Sea, are seeking his help in starting similar projects.
“We ask ourselves, where’s the limit? Are we a job company? We don’t know where the ceiling is,” von Ungern-Sternberg said.
The program also benefits consumers by helping keep butchers’ costs low. Across the border in Switzerland, where Indian workers aren’t available, meat costs nearly four times as much.
However, Swiss business owners have also been experimenting with new technologies, including sausage vending machines known as Wurstautomaten, which could reduce the need for small-scale butcher’s shops and ultimately help bring prices down.
Meanwhile, opposition to immigration is rising in Germany, which suggests the butchers’ reliance on imported labor might not be sustainable. Support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party recently hit an all-time high of 23%. Polls suggest it could emerge as the strongest political force in several German state elections later this year.
In Wisconsin, Rosenow, the dairy farmer, says he’s skeptical of the automated milking machines that he says are advertised in farm magazines. Some neighbours experimented with robots but went back to human labor because the robots constantly needed repairs, he says.
Robots would also cost twice as much as immigrant workers and be costly to maintain, Rosenow says. With immigrants, “labor is no constraint.”
Onan Whitcomb , a dairy farmer in Vermont, disagrees. He says that when he wanted to increase production he decided not to hire immigrant workers. Instead, he spent $800,000 on four Dutch-made milking robots.
Milk production per cow has grown by 30% and the incidence of mastitis, an inflammatory disease, has declined by 80%, he says, meaning less spent on antibiotics. Whitcomb says he was able to cut 2.5 jobs, and the investment paid for itself in seven years.
“We were milking 300 cows and we went to 240, and we still made more” milk, Whitcomb said. “That’s hard to beat.”
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Multinationals like Starbucks and Marriott are taking a hard look at their Chinese operations—and tempering their outlooks.
4 min
For years, global companies showcased their Chinese operations as a source of robust growth. A burgeoning middle class, a stream of people moving to cities, and the creation of new services to cater to them—along with the promise of the further opening of the world’s second-largest economy—drew companies eager to tap into the action.
Then Covid hit, isolating China from much of the world. Chinese leader Xi Jinping tightened control of the economy, and U.S.-China relations hit a nadir. After decades of rapid growth, China’s economy is stuck in a rut, with increasing concerns about what will drive the next phase of its growth.
Though Chinese officials have acknowledged the sputtering economy, they have been reluctant to take more than incremental steps to reverse the trend. Making matters worse, government crackdowns on internet companies and measures to burst the country’s property bubble left households and businesses scarred.
Now, multinational companies are taking a hard look at their Chinese operations and tempering their outlooks. Marriott International narrowed its global revenue per available room growth rate to 3% to 4%, citing continued weakness in China and expectations that demand could weaken further in the third quarter. Paris-based Kering , home to brands Gucci and Saint Laurent, posted a 22% decline in sales in the Asia-Pacific region, excluding Japan, in the first half amid weaker demand in Greater China, which includes Hong Kong and Macau.
Pricing pressure and deflation were common themes in quarterly results. Starbucks , which helped build a coffee culture in China over the past 25 years, described it as one of its most notable international challenges as it posted a 14% decline in sales from that business. As Chinese consumers reconsidered whether to spend money on Starbucks lattes, competitors such as Luckin Coffee increased pressure on the Seattle company. Starbucks executives said in their quarterly earnings call that “unprecedented store expansion” by rivals and a price war hurt profits and caused “significant disruptions” to the operating environment.
Executive anxiety extends beyond consumer companies. Elevator maker Otis Worldwide saw new-equipment orders in China fall by double digits in the second quarter, forcing it to cut its outlook for growth out of Asia. CEO Judy Marks told analysts on a quarterly earnings call that prices in China were down roughly 10% year over year, and she doesn’t see the pricing pressure abating. The company is turning to productivity improvements and cost cutting to blunt the hit.
Add in the uncertainty created by deteriorating U.S.-China relations, and many investors are steering clear. The iShares MSCI China exchange-traded fund has lost half its value since March 2021. Recovery attempts have been short-lived. undefined undefined And now some of those concerns are creeping into the U.S. market. “A decade ago China exposure [for a global company] was a way to add revenue growth to our portfolio,” says Margaret Vitrano, co-manager of large-cap growth strategies at ClearBridge Investments in New York. Today, she notes, “we now want to manage the risk of the China exposure.”
Vitrano expects improvement in 2025, but cautions it will be slow. Uncertainty over who will win the U.S. presidential election and the prospect of higher tariffs pose additional risks for global companies.
For now, China is inching along at roughly 5% economic growth—down from a peak of 14% in 2007 and an average of about 8% in the 10 years before the pandemic. Chinese consumers hit by job losses and continued declines in property values are rethinking spending habits. Businesses worried about policy uncertainty are reluctant to invest and hire.
The trouble goes beyond frugal consumers. Xi is changing the economy’s growth model, relying less on the infrastructure and real estate market that fueled earlier growth. That means investing aggressively in manufacturing and exports as China looks to become more self-reliant and guard against geopolitical tensions.
The shift is hurting western multinationals, with deflationary forces amid burgeoning production capacity. “We have seen the investment community mark down expectations for these companies because they will have to change tack with lower-cost products and services,” says Joseph Quinlan, head of market strategy for the chief investment office at Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank.
Another challenge for multinationals outside of China is stiffened competition as Chinese companies innovate and expand—often with the backing of the government. Local rivals are upping the ante across sectors by building on their knowledge of local consumer preferences and the ability to produce higher-quality products.
Some global multinationals are having a hard time keeping up with homegrown innovation. Auto makers including General Motors have seen sales tumble and struggled to turn profitable as Chinese car shoppers increasingly opt for electric vehicles from BYD or NIO that are similar in price to internal-combustion-engine cars from foreign auto makers.
“China’s electric-vehicle makers have by leaps and bounds surpassed the capabilities of foreign brands who have a tie to the profit pool of internal combustible engines that they don’t want to disrupt,” says Christine Phillpotts, a fund manager for Ariel Investments’ emerging markets strategies.
Chinese companies are often faster than global rivals to market with new products or tweaks. “The cycle can be half of what it is for a global multinational with subsidiaries that need to check with headquarters, do an analysis, and then refresh,” Phillpotts says.
For many companies and investors, next year remains a question mark. Ashland CEO Guillermo Novo said in an August call with analysts that the chemical company was seeing a “big change” in China, with activity slowing and competition on pricing becoming more aggressive. The company, he said, was still trying to grasp the repercussions as it has created uncertainty in its 2025 outlook.
Few companies are giving up. Executives at big global consumer and retail companies show no signs of reducing investment, with most still describing China as a long-term growth market, says Dana Telsey, CEO of Telsey Advisory Group.
Starbucks executives described the long-term opportunity as “significant,” with higher growth and margin opportunities in the future as China’s population continues to move from rural to suburban areas. But they also noted that their approach is evolving and they are in the early stages of exploring strategic partnerships.
Walmart sold its stake in August in Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com for $3.6 billion after an eight-year noncompete agreement expired. Analysts expect it to pump the money into its own Sam’s Club and Walmart China operation, which have benefited from the trend toward trading down in China.
“The story isn’t over for the global companies,” Phillpotts says. “It just means the effort and investment will be greater to compete.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Joseph Quinlan is head of market strategy for the chief investment office at Merrill and Bank of America Private Bank. An earlier version of this article incorrectly used his old title.
