COVID nearly ruined immigrants' shot at prized U.S. jobs. But not quite

When top European athletes -- or gifted Latin American musicians -- want to bring their skills to the United States, they consult people like Fiona McEntee. Her Chicago-based immigration law firm has been helping such clients since 2009.

It’s no surprise that the past year has been harrowing for McEntee and her clients. The COVID-19 pandemic stifled global travel. Meanwhile, the basics of applying for visas at U.S. embassies abroad became seized up by delays. “The global mobility landscape has been so drastically upended by the pandemic,” she says.

Even so, the 13-person team at McEntee Law Group keeps finding ways to open immigration’s door a sliver for highly skilled workers. In this changed landscape, many successes are coming in key technical fields such as banking, pharmaceuticals and software engineering. 

Data from the Department of Homeland Security shows a quarter-by-quarter drop last year of as much as 70% in the overall number of immigrants receiving lawful permanent resident status. Yet for people with advanced degrees or rare skills, the drop hasn’t been quite so severe.

For deeper insights about how each industry is riding out the COVID related immigration downturn, a new analysis by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team is illuminating. The research looks at the volume of LinkedIn members who moved into or out of the United States from May 2020 and April 2021.

During that year-long period, migration into the United States dropped more sharply than emigration out of the country, as COVID-related pressures took their toll. The chart above shows -- industry by industry -- the extent to which immigration’s share of overall migration in and out of the U.S. declined.

Immigration’s overall share declined 27% but finance was a relative bright spot, with a drop of just 6%. In addition to big commercial banks’ roles as havens for international talent, fast-growing fintech companies have emerged lately as aggressive hirers, too. In both sectors, there’s stepped-up demand for software engineers, data scientists and the math-savvy specialists known as “quants.” 

Energy and mining companies -- a long-time hub for foreign-born talent -- also showed only a modest decline (9%) in their immigration share. Surveys in recent years have found that more than one-quarter of U.S. nuclear engineers are foreign born. Even more striking, more than 70% of people earning advanced degrees in petroleum engineering from American universities were born outside the United States.

Software and information technology services showed a 25% drop in their immigration share, about in line with the national average. LinkedIn data shows that incoming migration in these technical fields didn’t change much in the 2020-21 period versus the prior year. But the volume of people leaving the United States increased significantly.

By contrast, the gate largely snapped shut for education, which posted a 50% drop in its immigration share. In prior years, notably the 2019-20 period, teachers and researchers from all over the world flocked to the United States for jobs -- at a rate more than double that of Americans taking jobs in other countries.

As for the more recent COVID period, education’s talent inflows slowed while outflows became far greater. Many foreign-born educators in the United States may have opted to return home in the face of various pandemic-related concerns.

How do specific visa considerations affect these trends? LinkedIn’s data focuses exclusively on geographic movement, without an eye to what types of visas or home-country passports might be held by each person switching countries. 

For visa-related insights, Homeland Security documents an across-the-board drop in admissions to the U.S. during the middle of 2020, across a wide range of categories. Most notable is a drop in H1B visas (temporary workers in speciality occupations such as tech). 

But in the May-through-July period last year, there also were steep declines for people with O1 visas (workers with extraordinary abilities), as well as P1 visas (internationally recognized athletes or entertainers) and even H2A visas (agricultural workers). These drops coincided with immigration curbs announced by the Trump administration. 

So far in 2021, there are signs that visa-granting is reviving to some extent, but not as rapidly as immigration attorneys had expected. The Biden administration has acted to roll back some of the immigration-related restrictions of the previous four years. But other barriers remain.

LinkedIn data shows that in the May 2020 to April 2021 time period, some of the steepest immigration drops have involved people coming from China (-78%), Brazil (-73%) and Taiwan (-70%). 

More moderate declines are seen in immigration from the United Kingdom (-34%), India (-27%), Canada (-24%) and Mexico (-21%). Countries showing at least a faint increase in immigration -- albeit from a small base -- include South Africa, Spain and Australia.

Methodology

A migration instance is defined as a member changing their location on their LinkedIn profile. This analysis calculates the inflow-outflow ratio (number of inflows to a market area for every outflow) for United States international migration. These countries and industries are then sorted from highest increase to steepest decline, based on the percentage change in the inflow-outflow ratio from May 2020 to April 2021, compared with the same period the year before.