The number of job openings in the US has been hovering
between 9 million to 12 million open roles, and
these empty desks are dragging down the economy.
You're talking about passing up something like $1
trillion in production every year that these jobs
go unfilled.
At the same time, there are millions of people who want
to come to the US to work.
It still is the shining city on the hill for most people
in the world if they're going to emigrate.
And we do surveys at Ipsos where I see this, the most
popular place for people to emigrate in the world is
still the United States.
It's clear that the US has a very important pull factor
in terms of migration. It's the largest economy in the
world.
But American immigration policies bar many employers
from hiring unskilled migrants, claiming it
protects American workers.
Joe Biden's 5 million illegal aliens are on the
verge of replacing you, replacing your jobs.
The public is split evenly on this.
51% of Americans surveyed by the Cato Institute worry
immigration could reduce the number of jobs
available. Meanwhile, a crisis at the border
continues.
Illegal immigrants. In fiscal 22, there were 2.7
million encounters at the border.
It's a sort of bum rush where the people who get to
make the choice about who fills this supposed labor
vacuum are the people who show up at the border, as
opposed to the United States Congress and the
people who voted for it.
The immigration crisis is of historic proportions right
now, both in terms of the number of people violating
the law and the fact that our legal immigration system
is facing backlogs like it's never seen before in
the history of the United States.
How US Immigration policies Hurt the economy.
The US is running out of workers.
It's been this way for a while, and with only 5.8
million unemployed workers and almost 10 million open
roles, the math just will not add up.
Meanwhile, a large majority of the US population is
aging out of the workforce.
The effect of a shrinking aging population is a
decline in innovation, combined with the fact that
you're just going to run out of the things that drove
economic growth.
You just look at the facts of the US population.
In the 1970s, there were about 15 people of older age
or after retirement for each working age individual
in the US. Nowadays that number is 25 plus.
It has been rising significantly over the past
ten years.
The US birth rate is also declining, so there will be
fewer young Americans to fill the open roles.
If we were in a world where we actually wanted to
reallocate resources in the most effective way globally,
you know, it's a no brainer to say, well, the US now
needs a lot of young people and we have them.
They want to come.
And it's just really a matter of understanding that
it's beneficial for the country.
But if we decide to import a larger number of young
people to to do labor to become new Americans, we
have to do it in a manner that's that's legal and
that's fair. If we could recruit people who spoke
English and had skills and were of working age and
healthy, that would be better if we're making a
pure economic argument, then allowing in the
elderly, infirm parents of existing American citizens
or just whoever shows up at the border.
It's a huge opportunity for the United States to blunt
some of the effect of fertility decline and
population aging by having an immigration policy that
may be a bit more focused, not necessarily on just
accepting anybody for compassionate reasons, but
for bringing in people to to fill in those skill gaps.
There are people who want to come to the US to work.
Almost 1 million temporary foreign work visas were
granted in 2022.
The reason why the United States is seeing more
migration in the last couple of years under this
administration in particular is because we
have more job openings now than we've had at any point
in our entire history.
This enormous increase in the amount of demand for
workers is driving people to move and seek opportunity
here.
I don't think I agree with that estimate of there
being, whatever, 9 to 12 million unfilled jobs unless
we balance it with the number of people who are
sitting on the bench, in other words, who aren't
looking for work anymore.
I don't think there's ever been a time when there
weren't jobs here if you were willing to undercut
local wages.
But as people come to the US, finding legal work is
difficult. Now immigration policy conversations tend to
center around the ability to work.
In 1986, Congress banned people working without
authorization in the United States.
This bill, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of
1986 that I'll sign in a few minutes is the most
comprehensive reform of our immigration laws since 1952.
They made it impossible to hire someone who was in the
United States illegally or without employment
authorization.
It traded amnesty for about 3 million people who were
here illegally for enforcement in the future.
Now they have a system called E-Verify.
Any employer, if they're going to hire somebody,
just. Puts in their name and data into a into a
database. It pings off all the, the federal holdings
just to make sure that that person is authorized to
work. And if the answer is no, then that person can't
get a job. That was the deal.
It never happened.
The amnesty happened, but the work authorization part
never went through.
It set up this magnet of people being able to come in
and work illegally and get paid under the table.
And so it never achieved the purpose that it was
supposed to achieve.
Immigrants are granted work authorization papers, which
are intended to correlate with the employees needed to
fill open roles and help the economy grow.
There are visas for entrepreneurs.
There are visas for people who want to work in
professional positions.
When those employers can show that there isn't
somebody in the United States with that same
expertise, for example.
So this is not about taking American jobs or something
like that, right?
Major US tech companies like Google, Apple and Meta use
this visa system to fill roles.
These jobs require proof of extraordinary ability, in
the case of 0-1 and EB-1A visas.
Visas like the HB-1 require at least a bachelor's degree
or equivalent, and L-1 visas require the employee
to have preexisting relationships with the
company that works in the US and abroad.
Take one example. I know we have this H-1B visa, right?
The whole idea of that was that it's filling a
temporary demand for high skilled labor with trained
foreigners that Americans can't do well.
What's supposed to happen if you believe in markets as
I do, and if a market is working properly, an
internal market, then you're going to attract
people to study those things in college and to
take those jobs. But the H-1B, because it always
somewhat undercuts the prevailing wage, it's never
allowed the market to exercise that function where
the wages go up and then people are tempted to go
into those fields and fill those jobs.
The green card system is extremely restrictive in the
United States.
The vast majority of people come through family ties,
and there are very few opportunities for people who
are sponsored by employers.
The regulatory barriers to sponsoring a foreign worker
are monumental.
You're talking about a process that typically can
take between 2 and 3 years for a worker to get through.
It is effectively off the table to sponsor a worker
for a lesser skilled position.
Maybe you're looking to hire someone who's going to
be just an electrician, doesn't require a college
degree, but you need some technical skills.
That is not something that our immigration system is
designed for.
Aside from a work visa, the main legal ways immigrants
can come to the US are via family based immigration
student visas through the diversity visa lottery.
Like Professor Bahar, By seeking asylum or by
claiming refugee status.
It's very important to note that these pathways have
been really narrowed and shut down over over the
years.
In 2022, foreign born workers accounted for 18.1%
of the US workforce, up from 17.4% in 2021.
While there have been some cases of companies
deliberately discriminating against US workers in favor
of foreign born employees, the majority of foreign born
workers actually create more jobs for Americans.
Immigrants represent 25% of entrepreneurs in the
country. They create firms at a higher rate.
They create firms that grow much faster in terms of
jobs. And if you look, for instance, at Fortune 500
companies, more than 40% of these companies have been
created by immigrants or children of immigrants.
The reality is that immigrants who come in do
create jobs for Americans, better paying jobs with
better benefits.
In the meantime, many desks continue to sit idle.
U.s immigration policy is far too restrictive for the
economic needs of the United States.
We haven't had an update in our illegal immigration laws
in more than three decades.
We're stuck with the same quotas that we had before
the invention of the Internet.
I mean, this is the most important aspect of our
immigration laws, the fact that far more people would
like to live in the United States legally than are able
to do so on an annual basis.
The US spends a lot of money, housing and caring
for migrants.
We've seen a lot of efforts from the authorities to keep
migrants from coming at a time where, you know, this
country needs a lot of workers and also when they
come to try to keep them from working and to try to
keep them perhaps in places without work permits in a
way that they're actually their stays being subsidized
by the American taxpayer, instead of actually telling
them, hey, go and work, find your talent, reach your
full potential.
If you're coming for economic opportunity, if you
want to work and contribute to the United States, you're
going to be an asset.
And with the increasing perils of climate change,
more people are going to be forced to move.
Unfortunately, the United States doesn't recognize any
any pathway to live in the United States based on
climate change or global warming.
More than 1 billion people may be displaced due to
climate change by 2050.
This could present an opportunity for the US
economy, much like Canadian immigration policies have
helped its economy grow.
Canada is a country that has a system which is very
different. It's a system where people with talent can
easily find or relatively easily find a legal pathway
to reach their full potential there.
Well, I'm a Canadian, and I should say for your your
audience. Our immigration policy here in this country
is has elements of compassion to it, but it's
really very self-interested and economically driven with
an aging population and a declining birth rate, the
only way that you're going to be able to continue to
grow your economy is you've got if you've got people to
be consumers, people to be workers and people to be tax
payers.
One could argue that Canada has benefited a lot from the
broken migration system in the US.
I don't believe that in Washington DC there is a
consensus about what the purpose of our immigration
system should be.
And so as soon as we realize migration is never going to
stop, then I think we can start to make some
intelligent choices about what we do with it.
Then the first thing I would do is I would secure the
border. I would complete a physical barrier that made
it impossible for people to just swim or walk into the
country without having to meet some border official
and present their their case and their demands.
I would reform the legal system to make it easier for
people to apply.
Would not necessarily mean that they would get the
benefit. And I would make sure that the needs of labor
and the economy were placed above family reunification,
not eliminate the latter category, but change the
emphasis.
Other groups suggest adopting more inclusive
policies overall.
I argue that the onus should be on the US government to
show why people should not be able to cross rather than
on people to show why they should be able to.
There are many reasons that there are many valid reasons
why someone might want to come and live in the United
States. And it should be a simple process, right, to
say I would like to work.
Danny Bahar and his colleagues are developing
what they're calling the Occupational Opportunity
Network to help keep decision makers informed
about how migrants can help the US economy grow.
And what we're trying to do is to really provide to the
decision makers the numbers that need to be on the table
when we're thinking about doing a comprehensive reform
of the immigration system.
By looking at every occupation in every locality
in the US and projections and historical data, we're
able to actually come up with numbers that are much
higher than the current caps in the in the US
system. And we hope that these numbers are going to
be the basis for a comprehensive immigration
reform.
It all starts with people because that's all an
economy is.
The reality is we need more workers to make up for the
declining birth rates in this country.
We need not only in the short term to fill these
labor shortages, but also in the long term to make
sure that we have the workers that we need.
So I think the message of trying to see these people
as a terrible burden instead of a blessing
because they could bring work and skills that they
could act, they're willing to work and they're willing
to contribute if they are just given the opportunity
instead of being bounded to a locality or to, you know,
to a place without subsidized by the taxpayers,
that's something that it goes beyond me.
I think it's un-American.
And I think this country can do much better than
that.