Slowing immigration due to federal delays, pandemic fuels California’s population drop
LOS ANGELES — When people call Aquilina Soriano Versoza looking for athome caretakers to hire, she often has to tell them she doesn’t have any available workers to refer.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began two years ago, she’s seen a steady drop in the number of immigrant workers migrating to California to fill those jobs, including Filipino immigrants, who constitute much of the caretaker industry. Filipinos are overrepresented among workers in a variety of health care occupations in the United States, studies show.
“People are looking to fill shortages that they have,” said Versoza, executive director of the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California. “A lot of the people doing the home work are older themselves. The pandemic took a real toll on having people step back.”
The shortage in immigrant caretakers comes as California’s population continued to decline after falling for the first time on record during the pandemic. But while discussions around the state’s population decline tend to focus on the lack of affordable housing and the wider acceptance of teleworking, another thread is less examined: federal delays in processing foreign migration requests that began before the pandemic and were exacerbated as the virus spread across the globe.
“Immigrants make up a significant part of the workforce, especially on the private side of the industry providing care to those who need 24-hour care,” Versoza said. “The visas that bring nurses in are limited, and there is no real work visa to bring in home care workers because they’re still considered unskilled.”
The pandemic significantly affected international migration both to and from the United States, resulting in the lowest levels in decades, according U.S. Census Bureau data released in December. Census Bureau estimates showed a net gain of 244,000 new residents from immigration between 2020 and 2021 — a stark drop from last decade’s high of 1,049,000 between 2015 and 2016, and lower than the 477,000 immigrants added between 2019 and 2020.
Although California saw positive immigration last year — adding 43,300 people — the level was below the average annual rate of 140,000 before the pandemic, state demographers said. The drop in foreign migration to California has taken a toll on multiple industries, experts say, including hospitality, health care, agriculture and construction.
“A whole assortment of the service sector area has been tremendously affected by a lack of immigrant labor that we haven’t really seen and is just really unprecedented,” said Emily Ryo, professor of law and sociology at the USC Gould School of Law.