- Research and Analysis
New Americans in Tyler
Published
New research released by the American Immigration Council—in partnership with the Tyler Area Chamber of Commerce and the Tyler Hispanic Business Alliance—shows that immigrants contributed $1.2 billion to the Tyler metro area’s GDP in 2019.
New Americans in Tyler highlights how immigrants fill crucial workforce gaps in addition to their financial contributions to the Tyler metro area, which included paying $75.8 million in federal taxes and $45.1 million in state and local taxes in 2019. Although immigrants made up 8.5% of the region’s overall population in 2019, they represented 12.4% of its employed labor force.
Key findings include:
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Immigrants foster an entrepreneurial spirit. In 2019, despite making up 8.5% of the Tyler metro area’s overall population, 17.5% of immigrants were entrepreneurs, meaning immigrants were 49.5% more likely to be entrepreneurs than their U.S.-born counterparts.
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Immigrants are filling critical workforce gaps. Although immigrants made up 8.5% of the region’s overall population, they represented 30.5% of construction workers, 19.0% of professional service workers, and 15.7% of all workers in the manufacturing industry in 2019.
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Immigrants are bringing much-needed talent. In 2019, 17.5% of immigrants in the Tyler metro area age 25 and older held at least a bachelor’s degree and 6.4% held an advanced degree (a master’s, professional, or doctoral degree).
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Immigrants help create or preserve local manufacturing jobs. In the Tyler metro area, immigrants strengthened the local job market by allowing companies to keep jobs on U.S. soil, helping create or preserve 900 local manufacturing jobs that would have otherwise vanished or moved elsewhere by 2019.