Strange that American businesses, once the mainstay of GOP support, are the ones feeling the sting of labor shortages, both at the highest (STEM work) and lowest (agricultural, hospitality and construction) levels. Some of this is due to a corporate attempt to keep labor costs low. The bulk of US STEM workers, contrary to popular belief, are poorly paid, overworked into burnout, and tend to leave STEM for positions in management or finance where they are vastly better paid. The visions of happy workplaces, with lots of snacks and recreational facilities, belies the majority of STEM workplaces. Oh, and a lot of vacancies.
Many STEM workers also fear roiling layoffs and obvious job insecurity on top everything else. Most mergers and acquisitions result in major worker cutbacks; start-ups that fail make up for many more lost jobs. The pervasive use of “contract workers” avoids fringe benefits and job security, big time. The gig economy does not work for most workers in those areas.
As crops rot in the fields, slaughterhouses stretch to find workers, contractors raise rates (and still cannot get enough workers), we all pay more, child labor laws are violated, and shortages become the new normal. While it might not be obvious, US citizens seem unwilling to take many back-breaking jobs at any wage: agricultural stoop labor, ditch diggers, jobs requiring carrying heavy loads, to name a few. $100-$150/day does not attract workers, and when US citizens take these jobs, most do not last more than a day or two.
Educated and experienced STEM workers who can secure that precious H-1B visa usually find that they cannot bring their wives or children, a flaw in our immigration system that makes entreaties for their desired expertise from the UK or Canada very inclusive of those applicants’ families. We lose; US companies are increasingly moving their research and development activities offshore as a result. And as we can see in so many tech giants (not to mention mom and pop small businesses), those “foreign workers” are the true “job creators.” For those at the bottom of the labor class, hardly the murderers and rapists the MAGA GOP claims, life waiting for a “maybe” can be living hell as our political parties duke it out over our southern border. Don Lee, writing for the January 10th Los Angeles Times, picks up on this tragic and profoundly unproductive reality:
“Even as busloads of migrants sent north by border-state officials have strained cities and stirred new political firestorms in Washington, fresh data are driving home the increasingly crucial role that immigrants will play for U.S. businesses and the economy at large, especially in California.
“Net immigration to the U.S. hit a 22-year high of 1.14 million last year, newly released Census Bureau data show. California’s overall population, which lost 75,000 people between July 2022 and July 2023, would have fallen by more than 225,000 if not for international migration, according to calculations by Brookings demographer William Frey.
“And that resurgence of immigration has not only given the U.S. a modest gain in total population but also done something far more vital for the economy: It has fueled the nation’s workforce in the last year… Foreign-born people ages 16 and older account for about 18% of the U.S. working-age population, but they accounted for more than 60% of the country’s labor force growth last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“As the overall population ages, as more baby boomers retire, and as family birthrates remain relatively low, the size of the U.S. workforce is increasingly dependent on immigration. That’s especially so in California because it has been losing many residents to other states, including more recently wealthier and higher-income people.
“Better technology can help increase productivity, but if the U.S. economy is to keep growing and offering the possibility of higher standards of living for more of its citizens, an expanding workforce is also vital, most economists agree.
“[The January 5th] jobs report for December, while showing resilient employment growth, offered new signs that the economy may be hitting a wall in terms of workforce participation and the return of those who dropped out of the labor market amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“But the same report showed a rising tide of foreign-born workers, including many more who appear to be on the sidelines of the labor market… ‘There may be a larger shadow pool of available workers than is generally perceived,’ said Bob Schwartz, a senior economist at Oxford Economics in New York. He said an expanding supply of workers could help cool wage growth, an important factor in inflation.”
As I have blogged before, with our birthrate well below the 2.1-live-births-per adult female replacement value, without immigration our population numbers would plunge, our labor costs would skyrocket further, and the burdens of caring for the elderly would literally be untenable. Fareed Zacaria, in his CNN Global Public Square program, polled his coterie of economists who projected a net annual GDP loss to us of $5 trillion by reason of our absurd immigration policies, which have not been materially altered since the Reagan-era reform of 1986. The chaos we see is a direct result of a gridlocked Congress unable to implement the necessary legislative reforms and updates. The same Congress that passed fewer than 10% of the number of bills passed by any prior Congress in any recent prior year! What we do see is a series of redlines from the House rightwing Freedom Caucus.
I’m Peter Dekom, and we owe all of these problems to a large number of voters who have outsourced their opinions to power-agenda-driven politicians focused on riling up their constituents into unproductive, dangerous actually, biases and prejudices that work against their own and this nation’s best interests.
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