It is hard not to think that migration issues are only about enforcement these days. And there is no question that the current U.S. administration’s emphasis on deportations has overshadowed other issues around migration in North America. But the reality is that all three countries in North America are aging rapidly, and immigration will have to be central to their future productivity, innovation, and economic growth. At some point, they will each need to come to terms with this in different ways.

For Canada, the discussion on immigration as part of economic policy is already well established. Indeed, the Canadian government has designed immigration policy primarily to respond to workforce needs, with increasing numbers of immigrants determined by provincial governments based on local labor force needs and their priorities for different economic sectors. With one of the lowest birth rates in the world, Canada’s population would shrink dramatically without a fairly ambitious effort to attract immigrants. Since it is relatively hard for immigrants to arrive unexpectedly in the country, there has been limited irregular migration to Canada, which has kept immigration issues largely insulated from major political pressures.

However, the numbers of temporary migrants in Canada shot up after the end of Covid, with limited oversight from the federal government, which put pressure on housing and local services in some communities. As a result, the federal government has reduced overall immigration levels and particularly tried to ramp back temporary immigration. Despite this, the attraction of human capital from abroad remains central to Canadian economic policy objectives and is well accepted by all political parties and the population as a whole. 

The United States also has a birth rate that is far below replacement level, though not as low as Canada’s, and immigration has become essential to expanding the workforce. As in Canada, immigration has also proved central to innovation and entrepreneurship, with a quarter of all patents having at least one immigrant inventor and roughly a fifth of all new businesses started by immigrants. However, in the United States, which shares a land border with Mexico through which unauthorized immigrants from all over the world have arrived, immigration has become far more of a sensitive political issue than in Canada. With the arrival of particularly large numbers of unauthorized immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in the period from 2021 to 2024, public opinion swung sharply against immigration generally. The current administration arrived with a mandate to limit unauthorized immigration and deport immigrants with criminal records.

However, there are important signs that public opinion is now shifting and becoming much more favorable towards legal immigration again, as well as quite skeptical of the administration’s attempts to deport immigrants without criminal records. And economists have begun to warn that a slowdown in immigrant arrivals could actually jeopardize economic growth and productivity gains. Even President Trump has acknowledged that certain sectors, such as agriculture and hospitality services, require immigrant labor. It remains to be seen if the administration will at some point address the role of foreign-born workers in the U.S. economy as a policy priority, and, if not, it is likely to become a priority in a future administration. 

Mexico too, has a birth rate slightly below replacement level, and will soon be facing labor shortages in key sectors. This is already starting to be noticed in parts of the industrial corridor in the north of the country, where the economy is growing the fastest and businesses struggle to find enough workers. To some extent, the arrival of tens and probably hundreds of thousands of immigrants from other Latin American and Caribbean countries over the past few years—many of whom wanted to reach the United States but ultimately stayed in Mexico—has helped address these shortages, with some Mexican companies in the north seeing this as an opportunity. However, it is still hard for companies to hire immigrants legally, since the wheels of the bureaucracy turn slowly, making it hard for immigrants to get legal and fiscal documents efficiently. And the government is now more focused on making sure that Mexican citizens who are deported from the United States can get identity documents quickly so that they can join the labor force.

Unlike Canada and the United States, Mexico has never decided its immigration policies based on economic considerations, since historically it was a country with a high birth rate and developing economy, which exported talent rather than needed to attract it. Today, however, with the birth rate dropping noticeably and the economy modernizing quickly across multiple sectors, immigration will soon become a crucial area for economic policy discussions. It will take some time, perhaps, before Mexican policymakers make the leap from preventing irregular immigration to attracting talent, but that moment is approaching faster than most realize.

And in the United States, the current moment of restricting immigration is likely to fade as well. Whether it happens in this administration or a succeeding one remains to be seen, but the economic realities of a declining population growth and increasing demand for workers in an expanding economy will sooner or later force conversations on immigration’s role in workforce planning and economic productivity. Indeed, for the United States, these discussions may actually help improve immigration policy, which has been largely divorced from economic policy, even if they have been interrelated in reality for over two centuries. 

In this, both Mexico and the United States may want to take a page from Canada’s experience, in which immigration policy is driven primarily by economic considerations and the desire to build human capital that can fuel workforce growth and enhance innovation and productivity. In fact, all three countries may turn out to be more similar in the way they need to address immigration in the future than it may currently seem. It is hard to peer past the current political moment in North America, in which ideas on how to restrict immigration dominate public debates, but it is the right time to prepare for the future in which immigration and economic prosperity are closely linked together in policy decision-making.