Immigrant IT Staff Help People Work Remotely During Covid-19
Date: May 28, 2020
As many Americans continue to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, immigrant IT workers play an essential role in helping the U.S. economy move activities online and in maintaining the digital infrastructure needed for businesses to run and for people to stay connected.
The latest data from the American Community Survey show that one in four information technology (IT) workers, or 1.2 million people, were immigrants in 2018. They are programmers like Eric Yuan was in his early career. Yuan, a Chinese immigrant, later founded Zoom, a video conferencing software that many people use to collaborate with their co-workers today. Among software developers, the most common IT occupation, 39.2 percent, or 529,346 people, are immigrants.
Across the country, immigrants play an outsize role in the IT workforce. For example, they make up nearly half of IT workers in New Jersey (47.4 percent) and California (44.2 percent), 28.3 percent in Texas, and 27.2 percent in Illinois.
Figure 1: Immigrant IT Workers in the United States
| Number of Foreign-Born Workers | Share of All Workers, Foreign-Born | |
| United States | 1,191,195 | 25.4% |
| New Jersey | 86,298 | 47.4% |
| California | 289,236 | 44.2% |
| Washington | 62,861 | 35.1% |
| Connecticut | 17,138 | 31.3% |
| New York | 71,573 | 29.6% |
| Massachusetts | 43,239 | 29.0% |
| Texas | 108,652 | 28.3% |
| Florida | 65,253 | 27.5% |
| Illinois | 51,484 | 27.2% |
| Georgia | 42,376 | 26.9% |
Within specific industries throughout the U.S. economy, immigrants often serve as IT workers, helping businesses function online as normally as possible during the crisis.
While the healthcare industry faces surging demand from patients seeking medical advice and treatments, 33,660 immigrant IT professionals, or more than one in seven IT workers in the industry, help doctors manage digital equipment and patients get access to healthcare services through telemedicine. In hospitals, immigrants make up 14.5 percent of the IT workforce.
Figure 2: Immigrant IT Workers in the Healthcare Industry
| Number of Foreign-Born Workers | Share of All Workers, Foreign-Born | |
| Healthcare Industry, Overall | 33,660 | 15.5% |
| Hospitals | 18,129 | 14.5% |
More than one in four IT workers in retail businesses are immigrants. As more people turn to online retailers to buy medicine, food, and other necessities, immigrants IT workers are on duty around the clock, helping process people’s orders. In some individual essential retail industries, immigrants are also significant shares of the IT workforce. They make up 32.7 percent of the IT workforce in pharmacies, 11.6 percent in supermarkets and grocery stores, and 39.1 percent in electronic shopping and mail-order house.
Figure 3: Immigrant IT Workers in Retail Trade
| Share of All Workers, Foreign-Born | |
| Retail Trade Industry, Overall | 27.8% |
| Supermarkets and Groceries | 11.6% |
| Pharmacies and drug stores | 32.7% |
| Electronic shopping | 39.1% |
In the education sector, more than one in seven IT workers, or 40,754 people, are immigrants, supporting teachers and students as they transition to remote learning. They are developing new digital platforms for classes, helping teachers upload their teaching materials online, and fixing technical issues for students at home. In colleges and universities, 28,128 immigrants make up 15.8 percent of IT workers.
Figure 4: Immigrant IT Workers in Education
| Number of Foreign-Born Workers | Share of All Workers, Foreign-Born | |
| Education, Overall | 40,754 | 14.8% |
| Elementary and secondary schools | 8,643 | 11.1% |
| Colleges and Universities | 28,128 | 15.8% |
In the finance industry, one-third of IT workers, or 119,609 people, are immigrants, making sure people’s savings are secure and investment transactions processed properly.
Figure 5: Immigrant IT Workers in Finance
| Number of Foreign-Born Workers | Share of All Workers, Foreign-Born | |
| Finance Industry, Overall | 119,609 | 33.3% |
| Banking and related activities | 59,645 | 34.0% |
| Financial Investments | 33,163 | 36.0% |
In public administration, one in eight IT workers, or 34,312 people, are immigrants, helping governments in their emergency response and assisting community members in need.
In the IT industry, more than one-quarter of the IT workers, or 59,288 people, are immigrants, enabling digital platforms that people increasingly rely on to manage their work and personal lives. About 41.5 percent of the IT workforce providing internet services are foreign-born. Some IT workers later became successful entrepreneurs, such as Sergey Brin, a Russian immigrant and co-founder of Google, and Michel Krieger, the Brazilian immigrant who co-founded Instagram.
Before the Covid-19 crisis brought severe disruptions to the U.S. economy, IT was already one of the fastest-growing job sectors in the U.S. economy. Between 2013 and 2018, the number of IT workers rose by 1 million, or 27.5 percent, to 4.7 million in total, outpacing the country’s overall job growth rate of 8.0 percent.
Figure 6: Job Growth in the United States
| Number of Workers, 2013 | Number of Workers, 2018 | Percent Change | |
| All IT Workers | 3,673,032 | 4,681,820 | 27.5% |
| - U.S.-Born | 2,784,434 | 3,490,625 | 25.4% |
| - Foreign-Born | 888,598 | 1,191,195 | 34.1% |
| All Workers | 146,224,090 | 157,964,150 | 8.0% |
While the IT sector continued to grow, many businesses struggled with finding enough skilled workers to fill their IT openings. In 2018, there were about 15 online job postings for each unemployed IT worker, based on data from Burning Glass Technologies and the American Community Survey.
The lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic have forced many industries to speed up their digital transformation. To recover from the crisis, the U.S. economy will become increasingly reliant on IT workers, many being foreign-born, to foster digital innovations and support businesses using online and mobile technologies.
