Immigrants are the underpinning of entire sectors of the region’s economy and have been the driving force behind Boston’s population and workforce growth since 1980. But now policy proposals from the White House threaten to upend entire sectors of the region’s economy, city officials and immigrant advocates said Wednesday.

“The deeper you go into how we are affected — whether it’s being served a meal at a restaurant at lunch or having a loved one cared for — I think it becomes very apparent that we are at the cusp of a very serious problem,” Jewish Vocational Services President Jerry Rubin said, noting the prevalence of foreign-born workers in the service and long-term care industries.

There are 1,095,953 Massachusetts residents who were born in another country — totaling about 16 percent of the state’s population — and 28.4 percent of Boston residents, or 190,123 people, were foreign-born, according to Boston Planning and Development Agency data.

Since 1980, Boston’s population has grown by 14 percent and immigrants have accounted for almost all of that growth, Alvaro Lima, the BPDA’s director of research, said Wednesday morning at an event hosted by the Boston Foundation.

“Immigrants are crucial to the growth of the population, they are crucial to the diversity of the city, they contribute into Boston’s economic growth,” Lima said. “It’s very hard to have wealth and health in a society and in a city if it’s not by advancing the integration of immigrants.”

People born in other countries hold 27 percent of the jobs in Suffolk County and account for roughly 24 percent of the county’s economic output, Lima said.

But President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration and refugee policy are having a chilling effect on the immigrant community, stopping immigrants from coming to the United States and causing immigrants already in the country to question their place in American society, Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition said.

“The vision of the new president since the campaign has been unapologetically anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, and many thought it might just be a marketing tool during the campaign but he’s kept his promise and he is delivering on all those promises as to what the new vision is,” Millona said. “Over the years we’ve seen mood swings about our immigration and integration policies … but we haven’t seen anything like this; running an election with a notion of seeing all immigrants and refugees through the lens of terrorism.”

And that chilling effect could have drastic impacts on the region’s economy. As the Baby Boomer generation ages out of the workforce and while the state’s unemployment rate hovers around 3 percent, growth will be limited unless there are new workers entering the labor force here.