A new report recently released by the Fiscal Policy Institute reveals some interesting findings about immigrants’ contributions to the state’s economy. By surveying immigrants from all income and skill levels, long time residents and recent arrivals, the report shifts away from discussions that focus only on low wage, undocumented immigrants to a broader one that includes the entire population.

According to the report, immigrants make up 21% of New York State’s population – national average is 12%. Most live in NYC where 3 million people, or 37% of the population is foreign born.

A few things from the report:

Immigrants in New York are by no means marginal to the economy. New York’s immigrants are responsible for $229 billion in economic output in New York State. That’s 22.4 percent of the total New York State GDP, a share slightly larger than immigrants’ share of population, and slightly smaller than their share of the workforce. Despite the common impression that immigrants work primarily in low-wage jobs, immigrants in New York State are entrepreneurs, managers, and workers in jobs at all levels of the economy, from the lowest-paid day laborers to the highest-paid investment bankers.

And in the city’s workforce:

Immigrants play a role in virtually every part of the New York City economy. Well over one of every three New York City residents was born in another country, and close to half of the city’s resident workforce is foreign born.….The immigrant share of wage and salary earnings is 37 percent of total resident wages [in the city].

In finance, immigrants make up a quarter of securities, commodities and financial services sales agents living in the city, and a third of financial managers. In real estate, they are a third of al brokers, four out of ten property managers, four out of ten architects, and seven out of ten construction laborers. Immigrants are half of all doctors, six out of ten registered nurses and seven out of ten nursing aides.

The report also includes research about the city’s undocumented workers, estimating that they are about 10% of the entire workforce. In some occupations like dishwashers and sewing machine operators the number of undocumented workers is quite high, 56% and 35 % respectively.

It is not only clear that immigrants account for a large portion of the city’s population growth in the past few decades, but their economic contributions are incredibly important to the city and state’s vitality – immigration and labor policies need to reflect this.

The report’s principal author David Kallick talks about the reports effort to change the dialogue. From the NY Times:

“We just felt like there was such a deep misunderstanding about who immigrants were that the political discourse often got far afield from any factual basis of what’s really going on here,” said David D. Kallick, a senior fellow at the institute and the principal author of the study, “Working for a Better Life.”

For full report click here.