Why is the US so stubborn about immigration? Why?!?!?
With huge labor shortages, this would be the time for Americans to be more open about immigration... and yet...
One of the most frustrating aspects of the Biden administration, to me, is their reluctance to take a stand on immigration. Yes, the toxic rhetoric by the former President is gone, thankfully. But in terms of actions, very little is changed.
I’ve argued here and here that in the times of labor shortages (and supply chain disruptions and inflation) the one smart policy that the US administration could do to relieve some of these pressures (not all, of course) is to let more immigrants in. And yet, the administration has stayed pretty much in line with the “do not come” (unrealistic) discourse.
The case in point is the recent decision of enacting Title 42 on the Venezuelans crossing the border. In other words, starting on October 12, the US stopped allowing Venezuelans to cross the southern border, and started returning these immigrants/refugees to México. Likely Mexico will deport them back to Venezuela (a country with documented massive violations of human rights, from where they were fleeing). In parallel, as a gesture of good faith, the US will allow up to 24 thousand Venezuelans to arrive to the US after applying in a US embassy abroad, if they met certain conditions.
Why 24 thousand? It’s beyond me. There are more than 7.1 million Venezuelans abroad, making it the largest refugee crisis in the World (surpassing Syrian and Ukrainian refugees). Yet, the US allowed 100 thousand Ukrainians in, based on a similar program, despite being from further away. By the way, according to my quick calculations, 24 thousand people is equivalent to the flow of only 10 days, based on the number of Venezuelan immigrants that left the country since 2014. So, I’m not particularly impressed with the generosity here.
But this is not about doing them a favor. It is about the US doing itself a favor!
In a Brookings blog post I showed (based on a sample that was made shared with me by the NGO Humanitarian Action which details info on Venezuelans who arrived to the US over the past few months and were sent on buses from the southern border to Washington DC) that these immigrant workers are exactly what the US economy needs. They are young, with 80 percent of them being between ages 18 to 34 (see figure below taken from here). Moreover, more than 50 percent of them have completed high school and nearly 20 percent have completed an advanced technical degree or even a college degree.
In further analysis I did during the weekend, I also found that many of them are held occupations in Venezuela that are projected to grow significantly over the next decade at a national level in the US. This is what is shown in the following figure. The figure’s vertical axis measures the share of Venezuelans in each occupation (defined in these major groups) in my sample. For instance, about 20 percent of all Venezuelans in the sample I have are construction workers, whereas 10 percent are business operation specialists. The sample also has cooks, vehicle mechanics, food processing workers, truck drivers (motor vehicle operators), etc. The horizontal axis measures the change in employment projections for each one of these occupations between 2021 and 2031, calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). For instance, the BLS estimates that there will be about 200 thousand more construction workers over the next decade, as well as 500 thousand more workers in business occupations. So, as long as the sample I got is representative (I believe it is) the Venezuelan workers that are now being denied entry are in occupations that are, in essence, needed now and will be needed over the next decade in the United States. What an irony…
But no Republican nor Democrat in the country is interested in these facts, apparently. It is really astonishing to me that no government official in the US (local, state, federal) is able to say the words “Maybe it is a good time to let immigrants in to try and alleviate the labor shortages that are putting pressure on inflation”.
Sadly, it seems to me that Trump won the ideas war on immigration being bad for US. I expect from the Democrats to do better. Much better.