When US President Joe Biden proposed taking in 100,000 war refugees from Ukraine, several commentators wondered why Washington did not do the same with tens of thousands of Afghan allies left behind to confront the Taliban. Such debates tend to portray the United States as incapable of handling more people. There is indeed plenty of room – and need – for more immigrants in an American economy that suffers from an acute and growing labor shortage.
According to a recent Conference Board survey, most of the 900 US chief executives consider labor shortages to be their “number one foreign threat.”
This threat has been accumulating for years. Amid the seismic cultural changes of the 1970s, women around the world began to have fewer children. With fewer babies becoming adults, the working age population – 16 to 64 years old – began to decline in the mid-1980s, first in Europe and Asia, then in the United States. Had its growth not started to decelerate sharply around 1998, the US working-age population would now be larger by 44 million people.
When US President Joe Biden proposed taking in 100,000 war refugees from Ukraine, several commentators wondered why Washington did not do the same with tens of thousands of Afghan allies left behind to confront the Taliban. Such debates tend to portray the United States as incapable of handling more people. There is indeed plenty of room – and need – for more immigrants in an American economy that suffers from an acute and growing labor shortage.
According to a recent Conference Board survey, most of the 900 US chief executives consider labor shortages to be their “number one foreign threat.”
This threat has been accumulating for years. Amid the seismic cultural changes of the 1970s, women around the world began to have fewer children. With fewer babies becoming adults, the working age population – 16 to 64 years old – began to decline in the mid-1980s, first in Europe and Asia, then in the United States. Had its growth not started to decelerate sharply around 1998, the US working-age population would now be larger by 44 million people.
The pandemic has only made a bad situation worse. In what is being called the Great Layoff, nearly 2.5 million Americans retired early. Two million more, including parents without adequate child care, left the workforce. Today, the United States has a labor shortage of about 11 million workers, a number roughly equivalent to the number of unfilled vacancies this year, nearly two for every unemployed person still looking for work.
Over time, economic growth is simply a function of population growth plus productivity growth: more workers, each producing more. But today, with fewer workers, the US economy is struggling to grow with a stalled engine. With labor shortages relentlessly driving up wages and inflation, America’s economic need to power that engine is becoming more urgent by the day.
The United States is not alone in facing the specter of demographic decline. Earlier this year, China’s National Bureau of Statistics shook the leadership in Beijing when it reported that, for the fifth year in a row, the number of births in the country was roughly equal to the number of deaths. This trend threatens its aspirations to become the world’s largest economy by 2030. China’s leaders are hardly encouraged by the experience of Japan, where a “silver tsunami” – a shrinking and aging population – produces anemic growth. In response, a global race is underway to expand dwindling labor pools. Governments are offering flexible hours to attract older workers, better training to inspire discouraged employees, and better day care to lure parents back into the workforce.
America, however, throughout history, has taken a different path to filling these gaps: rolling out the welcome mat to immigrants seeking a better life for themselves and their children. Reviving that legacy is critically important for America to sustain its economic advantage and maintain its status as a global superpower.
It is instructive to look to less polarized periods for clues as to how this might be done. The last major reforms in the United States date back to 1986, when President Ronald Reagan legalized some 3 million undocumented workers, formalizing their place in the workforce. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush significantly expanded immigrant admissions by up to 700,000 a year, while in 2007 President George W. Bush unsuccessfully convened Congress for reforms that would have created a temporary worker program and resolved the situation. of illegal immigrants. In 2012, President Barack Obama enacted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) to create a pathway for immigrants brought to the United States as children. In 2017, DACA was discontinued under President Donald Trump, a decision later found to be a violation of federal law by the Supreme Court. Since then, due to growing anti-immigration sentiment in both parties, progress has stalled.
Even before the pandemic closed international borders and halted visa application processing, restrictive policies had been reducing immigration to the United States. From a peak of nearly 2 million in 1997, net migration has averaged 1 million over the past five years and dropped to a modern low of half a million last year. Of the total global population of 26 million refugees, the wars in Ukraine and Afghanistan displaced 6 million and 2.6 million people, respectively. The United States has so far accepted 76,000 from Afghanistan and is expected to accept 100,000 from Ukraine, numbers that could increase dramatically and have barely begun to fill the US labor shortage of 11 million workers.
According to labor economists at the University of California Davis, about 2 million immigrant workers — half of them college-educated — have disappeared from the US workforce due to the pandemic and restrictive policies that policymakers could readily reverse. Unless Washington acts quickly, this labor shortage is only going to get worse.
It’s time for the Grand Opening. Canada offers a useful model: its strategy, which focuses on filtering candidates by economic skills, has been very successful in recruiting talent. While the US system has come to treat potential immigrants with suspicion, the Canadian system welcomes them as valued contributors, making application as quick and easy as possible.
Opening the door to merit-based economic immigration can and should be associated with more efficient and comprehensive efforts to prevent illegal immigration, which burdens health, education and justice systems and is unfair to those who wait patiently in line for your chance to emigrate legally. More rigorous enforcement would also make Grand Opening policies more likely to garner bipartisan support in Congress.
For the skeptics who say pragmatic policies won’t work in today’s polarized climate, I couldn’t disagree more. The need to address China’s economic challenge is one of the few topics both parties can agree on, giving new impetus to bipartisan efforts to do now what the United States has done in the past: make immigration work for—not against. – herself.
Here are four principles to help us get there:
Repeat the Reagan plan. We will update DACA and facilitate amnesty for undocumented Americans who work and pay taxes here, while tightening border security. With the technology available, we can do this efficiently and humanely.
Review the political narrative. Let’s emphasize strong support for legally qualified immigration. Since its founding, US policy has been based on the quintessentially American conviction that immigration and national prosperity are linked. America welcomed the underdogs of the world and built on their energy and talents. A myopic focus on illegal immigration has obscured the reality that, over the past two decades, 40 of the 104 Nobel Prizes in chemistry, medicine and physics have been awarded to immigrants. A fifth of today’s Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants. More recently, eight US companies developing coronavirus vaccines received approvals for more than 3,000 biochemists and other scientists through the H-1B visa program.
Modernize the H1-B visa program. We should encourage future entrepreneurs to apply. The US Department of Labor predicts that our current crop of STEM graduates could fill less than a third of the 1.65 million jobs projected to open by 2030. One in four US technology companies is struggling to fill job openings. qualified. The Biden administration has taken a good first step by expanding the number of merit visas reserved for candidates with experience in STEM fields. But clearly more aggressive measures are needed to fill these gaps, some requiring congressional action.
Strengthen provisions for refugees. In 1980, Congress passed the Refugee Act, offering people who can demonstrate that they have been or will be persecuted the right to apply for a green card. The law established a process whereby the number of refugees admitted annually is limited by presidential mandate, which due to pandemic policies reached a record 15,000 in 2020. Afghanistan refugees, the chaotic and confusing process of applying for asylum is the root cause of growing anti-immigration sentiment in the United States. The legislation proposed in Congress – the US Citizenship Act – aims to provide “a won pathway to citizenship, address the root causes of migration and responsibly manage the southern border”. While the odds that Congress will pass legislation to streamline this process remain low, history shows that when specific populations — such as today’s Afghans and Ukrainians — arouse the sympathy of the American people, progress is possible.
The United States’ global status as a beacon of freedom remains a strong pillar of American soft power. Washington cannot lose its moral authority any more than its global competitiveness. With labor shortages and rising wages limiting recovery, the United States has a realistic option: stay true to its roots and open its doors. As a first step, easing some economic pressure while Washington works on more fundamental reforms, why not start by welcoming even more refugees from Afghanistan and Ukraine?
How many people are quitting their jobs in 2022?
There is a great deal of focus on the Great Layoff, and with a record 4.5 million layoffs as of March 2022, it remains in full swing. … But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. The unemployment rate fell by 3.6%.
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How many employees quit their jobs in 2022?
One in five workers plan to leave their jobs in 2022, according to one of the largest surveys of the global workforce.
Why is everyone quitting their jobs 2022?
Dowling points to two factors driving this exodus: pandemic-induced burnout and better odds of securing a higher-paying job in a tight job market. This may interest you : Joint statement between the Kingdom of Spain and the United States of America. “Many people realized how volatile or insecure their industry was during the pandemic, especially those who worked on the front lines,” says Dowling.
What to do if I don’t want to work?
What do I do if I don’t want to work? See the article : NYC smallpox numbers ‘really’ not the full picture, health official says.
- Think about the quality of your mental health. …
- Try to find the root cause of your feelings. …
- Imagine how you want your life to be. …
- Make time for a break. …
- Consider your daily habits. …
- Think about other careers.
Is it normal not to want to work? Remember, it’s totally normal to feel like you don’t want to work. Take a mental health day.
Is it possible to live without working?
Most workers dream of the day when they won’t have to work anymore, whether it’s getting rich or retiring with a good amount of money in their accounts. As it turns out, living life without a job is possible. In fact, many people do! It’s just a matter of putting the right plan in place.
Why are people not returning to work?
Key points. Forced time off from work during the lockdown and pandemic is making people rethink their priorities and ponder whether to return. Many frontline workers, especially medical personnel, feel traumatized, tired and ready to give up once the pandemic is truly over.
Why is the Great Dismissal happening? The big layoff manifests as the big renegotiation Rising stocks and a booming housing market have made older workers rethink their retirement plans. Many have postponed their retirement date as the current economic climate allows them to retire more comfortably much sooner than anticipated.
Why are so many people quitting their jobs?
Dowling points to two factors driving this exodus: pandemic-induced burnout and better odds of securing a higher-paying job in a tight job market. “Many people realized how volatile or insecure their industry was during the pandemic, especially those who worked on the front lines,” says Dowling.
What is the Great Resignation 2022?
Stefan Ellerbeck. The Great Layoff – the record number of people who have left their jobs since the start of the pandemic – shows no signs of abating. One in five workers plan to leave their jobs in 2022, according to one of the largest surveys of the global workforce.
