WTIA’s theme for FullConTech on September 26 in Leavenworth is “The Immigrant Workforce.” And in our discussions, we’ll focus on two Washington industries that depend on immigration to fill critical jobs:  technology and agriculture.

To prepare for FullConTech, WTIA looked at immigration data, to separate fact from fiction. One thing we’ve wanted to understand is how Washington compares to other states and to the U.S. overall.

Here are a few things we’ve learned:

While Washington has a relatively high percentage of immigrants making up our STEM workforce – twice the national average – we’re far behind New Jersey and California:

Similar to Washington are Florida and the District of Columbia, which are also at 27%. Massachusetts and Delaware at 30%, have a larger immigrant STEM worker population; Illinois has a slightly smaller immigrant STEM workforce at 26%.

When we looked at agriculture, we found that Washington’s immigrant workforce moves closer to the top in terms of size.

Of the 165,741 H-2A temporary agriculture jobs in the U.S., about half were certified in only five states. One of those states is Washington, which is fourth in the number of H-2A certifications:

*The U.S. Government releases data on the number of jobs certified to be filled by people on H-2A visas but not how many people actually held those jobs.

Moreover, the Washington Farm Labor Association, as an employer, has the second largest number of H-2A certified jobs (9,455 or 5.7%). The employer with the most certified jobs is the North Carolina Growers Association (12,161 or 7.3%).

Finally, we compared the economic impact of immigrants without legal status. Economists estimate that if all unauthorized immigrants were deported from the U.S., we would reduce our nation’s GDP by 1.4% or $252 billion.

If we removed all unauthorized immigrants from Washington, our state would lose about $6.4 billion in state GDP. In California, state GDP would drop by over $100 billion. Other states that would see sharp declines in GDP are Texas, New York, and New Jersey.

Love data? You can get more on the 2015 immigrant STEM workforce from the American Immigration Council, and the Office of Foreign Labor Certification provides 2016 data on H-2A certifications.

To join the FullConTech discussion on The Immigrant Workforce, register here: