Migrants Now Hold 16% of OECD Jobs as Inflows Fall Again

Immigrants now account for 16 per cent of employment across the 38 OECD member countries, the organisation said on 12 November 2026, publishing the 50th edition of its International Migration Outlook. The same report records permanent migration falling for a second consecutive year, down 1.6 per cent in 2025 to 6.1 million new permanent immigrants, against 6.2 million the year before.

The fall is small and the composition inside it is not. Family reunification remained the largest single reason for permanent migration at 45 per cent of inflows. Labour migration, at 20 per cent, rose 13 per cent over the year. Humanitarian migration, at 10 per cent, fell 26 per cent. Rich countries did not take fewer migrants by much; they took a different set.

Two declines still leave 2025 above 2019

The headline decline sits on top of a decade of growth. The 2025 total was 12.5 per cent above the 2019 level, so two consecutive annual falls have taken the OECD back only as far as a level that would have looked high before the pandemic. Immigrants made up 12 per cent of the OECD population in 2025, up from 9 per cent in 2015.

Southern Europe drove what growth there was. The OECD reports particularly large increases in Portugal, Italy and Spain, while the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany all recorded notable declines. The report is explicit that migration and integration policies across the OECD are becoming more selective and more conditional, which is the policy mechanism behind the shift from humanitarian to labour entry.

Where the workers actually went

The employment numbers are the part of this report that will outlast the flow data. In just over half of OECD countries, immigrants contributed at least 50 per cent of employment growth between 2014 and 2024. One in five STEM graduates across the OECD is foreign-born, and migrants are over-represented among researchers and among the founders of innovative firms. The report also finds that migrants are more likely to work in lower-productivity firms and sectors, with their skills often underused, which is why it calls for better recognition of foreign qualifications rather than simply more recruitment.

Labour market outcomes held up in 2025. Almost 71 per cent of immigrants were employed across the OECD, though migrant unemployment rates rose in more than two-thirds of member countries. The employment rate of immigrant women reached 63.4 per cent, 15.1 percentage points below that of immigrant men, and that gap is the single largest pool of unused labour the report identifies.

Care work is the test case

One of the edition's two special chapters covers the recruitment and retention of migrant long-term care workers, a sector where ageing populations are raising demand faster than domestic hiring can meet it. The OECD's finding is careful: international recruitment can help with shortages, but it has to come with better working conditions, career paths and retention measures, and it should not substitute for investment in productivity and pay. That is a warning aimed at governments treating visas as a cheaper alternative to wage increases, as Parallax Nexus noted when Britain's Low Pay Commission settled on a rate 23p below its own target in October.

The judgment worth stating is that the flow number is the least interesting figure here. A 1.6 per cent drop in a year when labour entry rose 13 per cent is not a retreat from migration; it is a reallocation of it towards work, in countries whose workforces are shrinking. The reallocation is also fragile, because the same selectivity that raised labour migration cut international student inflows from 1.9 million in 2024 to 1.6 million in 2025, and students are the pipeline that feeds skilled labour migration two or three years later.

What the report cannot show is the effect of 2026. Its flow data stop at 2025, so the policy changes made this year across North America and Britain are not in these numbers, and the report does not attempt to separate the effect of AI adoption on employer demand for migrant labour from the other forces acting on hiring. Asylum applications fell across most OECD countries in 2025, by more than a fifth excluding the United States, while remaining above pre-pandemic levels.