Foreign Job Seeker Interest in the US Wanes

Job seekers around the world are showing less interest in applying for jobs outside their home countries, including for roles in the U.S., according to data from Indeed. 

Beginning in August 2024 and continuing into 2025, interest in jobs abroad has fallen sharply globally, coinciding with cooling labor markets and more restrictive immigration policies worldwide.   

Before the decline, the share of job seekers worldwide looking for jobs outside their home countries rose steadily throughout the immediate post-pandemic years, peaking in the summer of 2023 and staying elevated for much of 2024, explained Sneha Puri, an immigration policy analyst at Staffmark Group who contributes to the Indeed Hiring Lab.  

“After the pandemic, more people may have felt the grass was greener elsewhere, increasing interest in foreign work,” she said. “But by late 2024, the rise of immigrant-skeptic political parties worldwide may have helped quickly dampen that interest. Trends over the past five years show that shifts in foreign job searches often signal how workers feel about their local economies, their governments, and tightening immigration policies abroad.” 

Foreign job seeker interest was measured by the share of activity via Indeed job postings in countries by job seekers from outside of those countries.  

Global job seeker interest rose from 2.2% in March 2020 to a global peak of 3.5% in mid-2023. Between August 2024 and March 2025, interest dropped from 3.4% to a post-pandemic low of 2.3%. 

The decline was driven by a drop in activity for highly skilled roles such as doctors, engineers, and science and mathematics professionals. “Even so, these roles still ranked among the occupations with the highest share of international clicks, highlighting their dominant role in shaping global foreign job seeker trends,” Puri said. “Because these occupations consistently attract the largest volume of international interest, even relatively moderate declines in international clicks can drive outsized drops in overall foreign job seeker interest.” 

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U.S. Not Immune

Foreign job seeker interest in U.S. job postings followed the global trend. Interest peaked in August 2023 at 2.4% as the post-pandemic labor market was booming before steadily declining to 1.7% by March 2025.   

SHRM Senior Labor Economist Justin Ladner said it’s reasonable to assume that lower interest from foreign job seekers in U.S. jobs is due to constrained hiring in the U.S. and more restrictive immigration policies. 

But that’s just part of the story, he said, adding that it’s important to understand that the types of workers using a job board such as Indeed tend to be higher skilled and represent a certain slice of the overall job seeker population.  

“Our data analysis shows that foreign-born workers are well-represented across a wide range of occupation groups and industries, including computer and mathematical occupations,” Ladner said. “But a large portion of the migrant labor force are in occupations such as agriculture, landscaping, and construction. For these workers, it is likely that the job search process is different, mostly utilizing family and other contacts already in the U.S.” 

Foreign Workers Are Vital Part of US Labor Force  

Foreign-born workers have long been an important source of labor for U.S. employers. 

“It is well known that certain states, industries, and occupational groups are particularly reliant on the labor supplied by foreign-born migrants,” Ladner said. “However, the more compelling finding may be the fact that there are very few parts of the U.S. workforce in which foreign-born people do not make substantial contributions. 

“Given rapid aging in the domestic population and a persistent labor shortage that predates the pandemic, it seems likely that the contributions of foreign-born workers will only grow as U.S. employers cast an increasingly wide net to find the skilled workers they need to be competitive in the global economy,” he added.  

As of March 2025, 19.8% of all U.S. workers were foreign-born, up from 16.7% in June 2020, according to Indeed.  

Without immigrant workers, the U.S. labor shortage would be much exacerbated, Ladner said.   

It remains to be seen what the long-term impacts of foreign workers’ declining interest in U.S. jobs will be. 

“If flagging foreign interest in U.S. jobs begins to translate into lower actual immigration, productivity and economic growth could suffer, labor shortages could become more pronounced, and inflation could rise, especially in sectors most reliant on workers from abroad,” Puri said. “This includes sectors with essential workers, including health care and construction. While roughly 20% of the U.S. workforce is foreign-born, around 30% of construction workers, 26% of physicians and surgeons, and 40% of home health aides are immigrants.” 

Long-term, declining interest would be a big problem, Ladner said. “We know that foreign-born workers are a critical part of the labor force,” he said. “We would be looking at significant labor shortages. A long-term decline would present a lot of challenges for U.S. employers.”