Between 2020 and 2024, NH’s population grew despite having more deaths than births according to a Carsey Institute Study. This growth was due to migration, including significant immigration. And these immigrants have an outsized impact on the state economy: While immigrants make up about 7.1% of the population, they represent 8.3% of NH’s labor force, according to the American Immigration Council.
That growth is in jeopardy due to Trump administration policies focused on heightened enforcement as well as shifting visa and asylum rules that bring new pressures and widespread confusion for immigrant families, businesses, and service providers.
While NH has mostly been spared the violent scenes of arrests and workplace raids by ICE agents, visible cases are growing and making people fearful. In April 2025, a Venezuelan man made national news when he was tackled in a Nashua courthouse. And unconfirmed reports of ICE arrests in other parts of the state are circulating, including one caught on video in Holderness last fall of a man being handcuffed by men wearing masks outside a gas station.
Business leaders say the workforce the state depends on is being destabilized by shifting federal policies, mixed enforcement signals and weakened pathways for legal entry.
“In a state with one of the oldest populations in the country and persistently low birthrates, immigrants aren’t just helpful, they’re essential,” says Tony Fernandez, president of the NH Manufacturing Extension Partnership, adding that Indian and Asian immigration is essential in the tech and life sciences manufacturing sectors.
Even though NH has not experienced the intense enforcement activity seen in Massachusetts, Fernandez says manufacturers and other businesses close to the state line feel vulnerable. “Along the border it’s a very different picture,” he says, noting that Massachusetts technical high schools are heavily populated with Hispanic students. “They are a great feeder for the Nashua manufacturing community. New Hampshire companies are increasingly worried about what’s next.”
For employers, immigrant labor is essential, yet navigating the current environment has become fraught with uncertainty. For immigrant families, delays and policy changes create long separations, disrupted employment and lives put on hold. In December 2025, the Trump administration halted immigration applications for green card applications submitted by nationals from 19 countries who already face restrictions, according to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo.
Not Enough Workers in Some Sectors
Immigrants contribute to the workforce throughout NH, but have higher concentrations in sectors like manufacturing (12.5%), professional, scientific and waste services (9.6%), and healthcare and social assistance (7.8%), according to the American Immigration Council. This is likely because immigrants and naturalized citizens are more likely to have a graduate or professional degree, with 24.3% of them holding a higher degree compared to 15.5% of U.S. born residents, according to the NH Economic and Labor Market Information Bureau.
Michael Skelton, president and CEO of the Business and Industry Association, says the state is grappling with an imbalance in some sectors with too many jobs and too few workers.
“We don’t have enough workers to fill all the available job opportunities in the state, across several different industry sectors,” says Skelton. “Immigration has to be part of the solution to ensure we have the talent and workforce to compete nationally and globally.”
One of those industry sectors is healthcare, where nationwide nursing shortages could be helped by making immigration easier, says Greg Henrichon, executive vice president of Core Medical Group. Core Medical is a national health care staffing agency based in Manchester with a team of 150 full-time employees and about 1,200 W-2 contract employees in the field.
Henrichon explains that immigration bottlenecks complicate an already challenging picture where fewer people are born in the U.S. and fewer people are choosing high-demand healthcare specialties. “One of the main levers we can pull as a country to help the problem is on the immigration side,” he says.
Core Medical Group’s largest segment of employees is traveling nurses, who are assigned for 13 to 26 weeks in various settings including acute care, post-acute care, nursing homes, home care, and therapy. “As a staffing company our role is to help fill shortages and there’s no lack of news about this,” Henrichon says, noting that 60,000 to 80,000 registered nurse positions went unfilled in 2025. “In 10 years, that number will be 250,000. It’s a huge gap that’s getting bigger.”
A System Out of Alignment
For immigration attorneys, the past year has been defined by backlogs, unpredictability and a mounting sense that the system cannot keep pace with its own rules.
“I think many people have stopped making the argument that, ‘I’m not against immigration. I just want people to do it legally,’ because they realize that legally it is such a mess,” says immigration attorney Ron Abramson with Shaheen and Gordon in Manchester. “If you have the right to be with your family member and it’s going to take three years for the government to adjudicate the petition, what’s the right?”
Family-based petitions now take nearly a year to process, up from less than five months a decade ago. Asylum and refugee cases often take more than two years. And work visas require more documentation and can carry higher denial risks.
Henrichon says H-1B visas are another place the immigration system needs attention. H-1Bs are used by people in specialty occupations that require at least a bachelor’s degree, such as doctors, nurses, physician assistants, physical therapists, and medical technologists. Today processing times that once averaged six months routinely stretch to nearly two years, he notes, leaving hospitals and clinics unable to fill essential roles.
But the newest development, he warns, is even more alarming.
In late 2024, the Trump administration imposed a blanket $100,000 filing fee on all H-1B petitions. The previous fee was $750. For many community hospitals, safety-net institutions, and rural health systems, the new fee is not merely burdensome—it is prohibitive, Henrichon says, adding, “Positions remain unfilled, patient loads increase, and burnout deepens as facilities simply cannot absorb a hundred-thousand-dollar charge for each needed hire.”
To put the gap into perspective, Henrichon says each week 1,000 registered nurses are labeled as “quits,” which he says is an industry term. “They’re retiring because they’re burned out or changed positions, or found new work,” he says, adding that slowdowns in immigration increase labor gaps. “We were seeing 250 to 300 nurses per week coming in through various forms of immigration, but now that number has dipped closer to 100.”
Attorney Shiva Karimi, who chairs McLane Middleton’s immigration law practice group in Boston says employers in various sectors face near-constant regulatory shifts and compliance demands. And attorneys themselves are feeling the strain, she adds.
“There is a constant barrage of change. For example, something simple, USCIS [U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services] has changed how they’re going to receive their filing fees,” she says. “They’re not going to take checks anymore. This is what they directed you to do, and then you’ve got five rejected petitions not because you did anything wrong, but because they changed the system by issuing a policy memo.”
Karimi says a lot of her work focuses on helping employers and foreign nationals starting work for a new company. “To employers, we have to say, ‘you may be used to getting this type of visa for a particular kind of person in this time frame, but that’s shifted now and it’s going to take longer. It may not work. It may be denied,’” she says. “That whole world has really shifted for people.”
Since the Trump administration issued a proclamation in September entitled “Restrictions on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers” imposing a $100,000 fee for certain H-1B visa petitions, Karimi says multiple updates from USCIS have modified to whom this applies.
“Currently it applies to individuals who are outside of the U.S. and applying for a new H-1B and coming in. That’s probably the biggest group of people that are applying,” she says. “If you’re a student and you’re here and you’re filing for a change of status in the United States, even though it’s your first H-1B, it wouldn’t necessarily apply to you.”
Adding to Communities
Skelton stresses that fixing the immigration system is a matter of caring about the overall health of local communities. “Our experience throughout our history is that immigration is additive,” he says. “It expands the vibrancy of our communities, not just the economy.”
Skelton notes the breadth of entrepreneurial activity driven by immigrant residents in the state. “There are so many examples of immigrant entrepreneurs creating new services and positive economic impacts,” he says, adding that a big challenge over the past year has been keeping up with rumors, reversals, and decisions pending in Congress. “The sooner we can get to clarity and stability around immigration policy, the better positioned businesses will be.”
Communities are considered healthy and vibrant when they have a wider mix of ages. New Hampshire is an aging state, but there are proportionally more immigrants of working-age than their U.S.-born counterparts. The foreign-born population between the ages 16 and 64 is 76% while the U.S.-born population of the same age group is 63.1%, according to the American Immigration Council.
New Hampshire had the 5th lowest fertility rate of all U.S. States and the District of Columbia in 2023, according to the NH Fiscal Policy Institute (NHFPI), with 46.8 births per 1,000 Granite State females ages 15 to 44. More than one in five NH residents is over the age of 65.
Skelton believes the state must embrace a comprehensive workforce strategy that includes retaining young people, attracting new residents and welcoming immigrants. “To compete,” he says, “we need every pathway available.”
Landscaping and Seasonal Work
While immigrants have an outsized impact in many professional industries, they are also critical to the trades, including landscaping, snow-removal, and construction. Across the country, ICE raids have shuttered landscaping firms with little warning, creating anxiety among workers and employers.
Mark Aquilino, president of Manchester-based Outdoor Pride Landscape & Snow Removal, felt the stakes clearly when his company partnered with the national Visterra Landscape group last September. The partnership doubled the firm’s New England workforce and expanded benefits such as employer-paid healthcare and stock options. Stability mattered, Aquilino says, not only for business growth, but for employees navigating a volatile immigration policy climate.
Aquilino has watched colleagues lose entire businesses in the span of a day. “Two Massachusetts landscaping companies shut down literally overnight after ICE raids,” he says. “Even people who are fully documented feel the fear.”
Abramson, who represents businesses, educational institutions and nonprofits, says the past year has brought an uptick in I-9 investigation compliance cases. Some cases involve employers receiving “No-Match” letters from the Social Security Administration (SSA) informing them an employee’s name and Social Security number on a W-2 doesn’t match SSA records. “We’ve had employers ask what to do if documentation doesn’t match up,” he says. “It has run the gamut, and this has subsided a little bit in recent months because people are adapting to the new normal. But we had a real flurry of inquiries into these issues.”
Aquilino says many Hispanic employees now carry extra identification, and some worry about being stopped or questioned. “We tell them to call us. We’ll come down,” he says. “We make sure everyone is documented. If we do get Department of Labor audits, I can sleep better at night knowing we’ve done our job.”
Left in Limbo
As employers struggle with workforce uncertainty, immigrant families face even more personal turmoil. When they don’t show up to work out of fear of an ICE raid, they might not be paid, and this is money their families depend on.
“When these things start, people don’t know what to do,” says Clement Kigugu, founder of Overcomers Refugee Services, a Concord-based nonprofit serving refugees. “People were expecting relatives to come, but now everything has stopped. There’s trauma when a spouse is here and the other is stuck overseas.”
Overcomers has seen a spike in demand for basic services including case management, health promotion, mental health support, and help navigating federal paperwork. Heightened vetting requirements and prolonged delays have left many families without any clear sense of when loved ones will arrive. “People need community,” Kigugu says. “And they need to know the door won’t close on them.” With federal support inconsistent, Kigugu says the organization has leaned heavily on private donations to keep programs running.
The changing federal immigration policy landscape will continue to affect businesses and families. Fernandez puts the stakes plainly. “We can adapt, support immigrant communities, and sustain our economy, or we risk letting fear, bureaucracy and political turmoil unravel decades of progress.”
Right: Clement Kigugu, founder of Overcomers Refugee Services
Life on Hold for Sudanese Refugees
Adam Hassan and Mustafa Ezzeldin, two Sudanese men living in Concord, arrived in NH a decade ago as refugees after fleeing violence that killed many family members. Hassan is now a U.S. citizen who drives for rideshare and delivery companies. Ezzeldin, who is disabled, is still working toward citizenship. Both have relatives trapped overseas with no timeline for reunification.
Delays shape every part of life: spouses abroad cannot work, children’s schooling is disrupted, and those here struggle emotionally as loved ones remain in danger. “If someone our age tried today to do what we did, they wouldn’t be able to,” Hassan says. “I cannot sleep. My heart is bleeding.” He witnessed atrocities during his escape and now has 25 relatives missing in Sudan’s current conflict. Ezzeldin’s wife applied for a visa last year and remains abroad without updates.
The refugee process begins with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees identifying and interviewing applicants, followed by U.S. security, medical, and background screenings before the State Department and nonprofit resettlement agencies approve placement, says Clement Kigugu, executive director of Overcomers Refugee Services in Concord. Kigugu founded Overcomers in 2013 after coming to the United States from Rwanda in 2006 as an asylum seeker fleeing violence after years running nonprofits supporting victims of genocide, war, HIV and trauma.
Hassan and Ezzeldin fled the Janjaweed, the militia that has targeted non-Arab ethnic communities in Darfur with mass killings, rape, and village destruction. More recently, Rapid Support Forces—widely viewed as the modern Janjaweed—have seized cities such as El Fasher, carried out genocidal massacres, and triggered mass displacement.
Their uncertainty has been compounded by a new United States Citizenship and Immigration Services directive freezing all pending green card applications filed by refugees admitted between 2021 and early 2025. The policy requires mandatory re-interviews and reassessments of whether applicants qualified as refugees at admission, potentially delaying reunification further.
“People don’t understand, Sudan is in a war still today,” Kigugu says. “Adam and Mustafa fled the Janjaweed who were chasing them. They may never see their families again and can’t go back,” he says.
“We don’t want anything special,” Hassan says. “We just want our families safe.” He is grateful to be in the United States, he adds, but the separation is crushing. “When the genocide started, I cannot sleep,” he says. “It’s very difficult.”
Mental health support could help refugees, but access is limited. Stigma plays a major role, Kigugu says. “It’s not common in Africa and the concept is equated with being crazy. Also, there aren’t many refugees with a mental health background or therapists who can speak their language,” he says. “[People] survive but there are so many challenges even if you are safe yourself.”
