Nora Soto has a big family. She’s one of 36 cousins, most of them born in the U.S.

Most are in their 20s or 30s, work in all types of industries and have kids of their own.

Experts say Texas’ population wouldn’t be at the levels it needs to be to meet the state workforce needs without Hispanic families like Soto’s contributing to the state’s population growth.

“We would be in a dire economic situation in the state because we have a growing economy. With economic growth, you have to have a growing labor force,” said state demographer Lloyd Potter. “The non-Hispanic labor force is not growing. It’s getting smaller and smaller.”

Waves of immigrants — mostly from Mexico — who came to the U.S. during the '80s, '90s and early 2000s and their U.S.-born children are playing a key role in keeping the population close to necessary levels of growth.

As in the rest of the U.S., Texas' total fertility rate is below the level it needs to be to replace the population that is dying off, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. The report, released Jan. 10, looked at data through 2017.

A replacement-level fertility rate needs to be at 2,100 births per 1,000 women. The U.S. has a rate of 1,765 per 1,000. Texas has a rate of 1,916 births per 1,000 women.

Hispanic women in Texas have a fertility rate of 2,136.5 births per 1,000 women.

Potter said whites tend to be older and aging, whereas Hispanics tend to be young and in the prime of their working years.

“If you think about the population as a pyramid, we have a wide base that is very young and very Latino,” Potter said. “If you had only non-Hispanic whites, you would have an inverted structure: white and aging.”

Overall, Texas’ fertility rates have decreased, even among Hispanic women, Potter said, but those rates remain higher than that of non-Hispanic white and black women.

Soto, a 33-year-old mother of one, said her siblings and cousins work in everything from plumbing to retail and legal work. One of her cousins is a film editor in Los Angeles. Growing up, Soto said, times were tough.

Most cousins didn’t go to college, mainly due to economic pressures. But they found jobs and developed skills as needed.

“We’re in everything. The first generations [born in the U.S.] really struggled and it was about survival,” Soto said. “But now the younger generations are able to do more. They’re more artistic. People are being themselves. And we’re more visible everywhere.”

Texas’ economy would still have grown over the past three decades without the mass waves of international and domestic migration, but it would have done so at a much slower pace, said Pia Orrenius, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas vice president and senior economist.

Orrenius said the Texas economy diversified away from oil, cotton and cattle after the 1980s and migrants — most of whom were Mexican — played a key role in that. The state was able to attract new businesses thanks to a pro-business climate and a stable workforce.

“You need labor to attract investment and you need investment to diversify the economy,” Orrenius said. “Investment flows to where there’s a ready supply of labor. It’s not going to flow to where labor is difficult to find and hire.”

But others, like Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a research group that calls for lowering immigration levels to the U.S., say the immigrant contribution isn’t all good news — even for those immigrants.

“There’s no question that adding millions of people makes the Texas economy bigger, but does it make it richer?” Camarota said.

Camarota said that because many of the immigrants who came to Texas in recent decades took low-wage jobs, their quality of life was low, and that in turn grew the state’s low-income and poverty-level population.

Mark Hugo Lopez, director of global migration and demography research at the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, said that across the country, immigration from Latin America and the growth of the Hispanic population that followed has helped remake the demographics of the U.S. as a whole.

In 2015, the Pew Center conducted an analysis of immigration to the U.S. from 1965 to 2015, a wave of immigration driven primarily by Mexicans. That 50-year wave, the center's analysis found, is slightly lowered the country's median age and reshaped the country's demographics by 2015:

62 percent white

12 percent black

18 percent Hispanic

6 percent Asian

Without the influx of immigrants from 1965 to 2015, the center found, the U.S. would look very different:

75 percent white

14 percent black

8 percent Hispanic

Less than 1 percent Asian

While Hispanic birth rates are also in decline around the U.S., Lopez said, Hispanics will continue playing an important role in the country’s future.

“Young Hispanics under 18, who are largely U.S.-born, are going to be a big part of the workforce. They’ll play an important role depending on what education and skills they get,” Lopez said. “They’re going to be critical in supporting Social Security.”

Soto’s mother, Roselia Soto, was in the immigrant wave the Pew Center studied.

She moved between Mexico and the U.S. for years but settled in the U.S. in '80s and became a legal permanent resident thanks to the 1986 immigration reform signed by President Ronald Reagan.

Nora Soto said growing up with a large family was difficult, but now that she and her cousins are adults and are deeply rooted in Texas, she feels things are better off for them.

“When I was younger, I didn’t like it. With that many kids comes the poverty. Most people can’t raise six kids comfortably,” Soto said. “But now that I’m older, I like how much we can depend and rely on each other.”