GOOD news (for a change) from the Wall Street Journal:
“Rebound in Immigration Comes to Economy’s Aid
“Rise in foreign-born labor force boosts worker supply, eases wage pressure and aids Federal Reserve’s goal of ‘soft landing’ ”
According to the Journal, “The U.S. economy’s prospects of a soft landing are getting a boost from an unexpected source: a historic rise in immigration. The inflow of foreign-born workers, which had slowed to a trickle in the years up to and including the pandemic, is now rising briskly as the U.S. catches up on a backlog of visa applications and the Biden administration accelerates work permits.”
Moreover, the Biden administration “has made unprecedented use of a little-known immigration power known as humanitarian parole to quickly and legally let in hundreds of thousands of people from places such as Ukraine, Afghanistan and Venezuela.”
All of this is making a palpable difference to U.S. employers who have struggled to find and retain workers, the Journal added.
“Two years ago, Veselka, a Ukrainian diner in Manhattan’s East Village renowned for its pierogi, was so short on cooks and wait staff that owner Jason Birchard was ready to cut the restaurant’s hours and end table service.”
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration launched a program to sponsor Ukrainian refugees to live and work temporarily in the U.S. “Since then Birchard has sponsored 10 Ukrainians, mostly extended family members of his existing employees, and eight now work at his restaurant. ‘One of my biggest challenges postpandemic was hiring. Not so anymore,’ he said….”
Over a year ago, the Journal said “the number of vacant jobs surged to a historic high of 12 million, double the nearly six million unemployed, according to the Labor Department. Openings have since fallen to a still-high 8.8 million in July, roughly 50% more than the unemployed. The falloff in migrant inflows compounded the shortage, especially in industries such as construction, healthcare and restaurants. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that declines in net international migration raised the ratio of job vacancies to the unemployed by roughly 5 percentage points between 2017 and 2021.”
We should point out that we’re talking about the U.S., which has a population of over 300 million and the world’s largest economy that pays high wage rates and is funding various apprenticeship and training programs at the federal and state levels.
But like the CNMI — and Guam, and Japan, and South Korea and Western European nations and other developed countries and jurisdictions — the U.S. has what the Journal calls “a long-term labor crisis” that, so far, hasn’t been “solved” by high wages and apprenticeship/training programs.
What we should find baffling, however, is the failure of many policy makers and/or pundits to mention the most obvious reason for this state of affairs: in developed nations and/or jurisdictions, many individuals can get a college degree (or two or more) — and they can pursue their “passion,” which, as the official statistics show, doesn’t always include construction work, waiting tables, cleaning hotel rooms, care-giving or trades jobs despite attractive wage rates.
The Journal reported that industries such as construction and services “have seen faster wage growth than the economy overall.” But in the land of opportunity, there are so many other opportunities, and these include not having a job, like that California surfer who used food stamps to buy sushi. (“This is the way I want to live and I don’t really see anything changing,” he said in front of the news cameras. “It’s free food; it’s awesome.”)
In the NMI’s case, its labor shortage is nothing new. It has been glaringly evident since Japan created a prosperous island economy before World War II. The NMI’s local population is small. And today, local people are U.S. citizens who can move to the states or other territories to pursue their dream career or lifestyle.
Today, however, the NMI’s labor shortage is getting worse mainly because of the federal bureaucracy’s refusal to implement the CW law’s “touchback” provision in a manner that will “best meet…[NMI employers’] human resource needs,” as clearly stated by the law’s authors. Instead, the feds want the affected CWs to exit for “30 days” — which could take up to seven months — all at the same time, regardless of the impact on the local economy and the NMI government’s revenue base.
The Biden administration has announced that it would offer work permits to 470,000 Venezuelan migrants who are already in the U.S., including those who have entered illegally. Why can’t the feds “fix” the way they’re implementing the touchback provision so legal and federally vetted CWs can exit the NMI in a more orderly fashion that takes into account the local business cycle. That is not a big ask.
Sadly, is seems that the NMI doesn’t have enough political clout to persuade the feds to stop strangling what remains of the local economy. As the Journal has noted, “the offer of work permits for Venezuelans…was primarily driven by Democratic mayors and governors who said it would allow migrants to move out of city-run shelters and support themselves.”
Since about 2014, the Journal reported, “hundreds of thousands of migrants a year have crossed into the U.S. illegally to seek asylum, citing violence and poverty at home. More than two million migrants attempted to enter the U.S. illegally in each of the past two years.” Many of them, it seems, will be “rewarded” with work permits.
But for the NMI’s law-abiding employers and CWs, the feds can only offer costly red tape and uncertainty.
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