For as long as most of us can remember, business has been able to call on a ready supply of foreign workers. The giants of Silicon Valley, farmers and food processors, hotels and restaurants, housebuilders and megastores: All have dealt with labor shortages by recruiting immigrants. One result has been an astonishing demographic transformation: 16% of the British population, 20% of the Swedish population, 19% of the German population and 14.3% of the U.S. population were born abroad.

This golden age for employers is coming to an end. Popular discontent with mass immigration is rising, anti-immigrant parties are flourishing and mainstream parties are finally taking note. In Britain, for example, 67% of people say that immigration is too high; the anti-immigrant Reform Party is well ahead in the polls. Donald Trump is not the only leader who is clamping down on immigration. Mark Carney, Canada’s new prime minister, has imposed a cap on temporary foreign workers and international students. Britain’s Keir Starmer has spoken about the danger of Britain turning into a "nation of strangers." If dealing with rising tariffs is the biggest challenge for companies abroad, dealing with tighter immigration controls is the biggest challenge at home.

What should business do about this change in mood? One instinctive response will be to wait for the mood to change again. Surely the Trump whirlwind will blow itself out? And surely people will see sense when they have to face shortages of the foreign care-workers who look after their aged parents? A second instinctive response is to help to change the mood by lobbying for more liberal immigration policies.

Both responses would be mistaken: We are witnessing a paradigm shift when it comes to mass immigration rather than a temporary change. The backlash extends to liberal societies as well as conservative ones — Sweden has introduced financial incentives to encourage migrants to return whence they came — and is powered by cultural worries more than economic calculations. It is difficult to accept the old promise that diversity is always a strength when you are confronted with grooming scandals in Britain’s immigrant-heavy northern towns or gang wars in Swedish suburbs. Remember that the restrictionist regime that the U.S. put in place in 1924 remained in operation until 1965, despite a system of mass production based on manual labor and a generally buoyant economy.

Companies may experience the consequences of this paradigm shift sooner than they expect. In April, net migration to the U.S. slowed to an annualized rate of 600,000, down from four million in 2023. The flow of illegal immigrants across the Mexican border, which had risen to millions under Joe Biden, is now a trickle. Net migration to Britain halved last year; it fell by an even higher percentage in New Zealand. This fall in immigration rates is happening even as domestic birthrates have fallen below replacement level, significantly so in Japan and Italy, and when once low-hanging fruit, such as women workers, have been plucked.

So how should companies cope with this new world? Two strategies strike me as essential. The first is to start treating the supply chain of talent with the same thoroughness as they treat the supply chain of materials and parts: as something that needs to be carefully planned and constantly repaired. Domestic supply chains have fallen into disrepair in recent decades, in part because both governments and employers have been able to turn to the easy option of importing immigrants. Avenues of upward mobility have been allowed to wither (Harvard has more students from the richest 10% of the population than from the bottom 90%); vocational education has been badly neglected.

Companies need to take a more prominent role in fixing domestic supply chains. Tap into the neglected pool of talent in working-class communities by sponsoring charter schools, endowing university scholarships or spotting and then sponsoring talented students. Improve vocational education by introducing apprenticeship programs or forging relationships with local high schools. Take a more prominent role in providing career guidance in local schools. Employ more unconventional workers such as older workers by introducing flexible working hours or extended holidays.

The second is to think harder about how to apply laborsaving techniques to production. This is particularly true of industries that now rely on imported labor such as construction, farming and hospitality. America’s postwar experiment with the factory-based production of houses proved to be a tremendous success, with the price of factory-made homes falling by two-thirds in 1955-73, before it was destroyed by a combination of construction unions and red tape. In agriculture, "intelligent" AI-powered machines can do things that were too delicate for dumb machines, such as nurturing seeds and controlling weeds. In hospitality, robots can do ever more delicate cleaning jobs.

There are already some inspiring examples of companies doing clever things to improve training or else replace labor with workers. Amazon.com Inc. and Palantir Technologies Inc. are sponsoring high-flyers through college or recruiting more students from state schools. Timpsons, a British company that cuts keys, fixes phones and repairs shoes, employs ex-prisoners. Eat & Holdings, a Japanese food and restaurant company, has introduced an AI-powered cooking robot in one of its restaurants. Retailers have introduced self-checkout on a massive scale. But such thinking needs to spread and accelerate throughout the economy.

Moving from a high immigration regime to a lower immigration regime will neither be easy nor pretty: The repatriation of undocumented workers has already set off turmoil in Los Angeles and elsewhere. But trying to resist the pressure to control immigration is likely to prove futile. And lower immigration will produce benefits as well as costs for both the economy and social justice. Companies will think harder about automating tedious jobs and boosting productivity. And society will invest more effort in discovering lost Einsteins at home rather than simply allowing a blunt and inefficient immigration system to do the hard work for them.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of "The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World."