America Needs Workers and Immigration Reform Could Provide Needed Employees
Every Day Employers Are Pleading for Workers, and if Congress Addressed Immigration Responsibly, Employee Candidates Could be Available
Every day we see signs where employers are pleading for employee candidates to appear for available jobs. Service industries have vast needs for employees. Restaurants close early or curtail operations on some days because they cannot obtain sufficient numbers of workers. Retail businesses have signs seeking worker candidates. Pharmacies are curtailing hours because they do not have enough pharmacists and technicians and some are creating long lines for their customers citing an absence of sufficient pharmacy workers. Signs abound everywhere seeking employees for the fast food industry with many advertising their latest hourly pay rates and some offering signing bonuses.
Economists and labor analysts wonder how to solve the deficit in available employees. They propose innovative ways to attract employees, but still the employees do not appear.
Congress tried to increase the Minimum Wage as a way to increase the available labor pool and to provide a living wage for entry level workers, but Senator Kyrsten Sinema sashayed her way to the floor of the Senate and gave it a thumbs down vote. She then did the same for the Democratic Party ostensibly to attract more Republican and Wall Street campaign contributions and do the bidding of the National Association of Home Builders to prevent ending carried interest tax policies.
But there is a way to address the labor shortage problem which has not abated even as Covid infections have become more normalized as available vaccines have demonstrated the ability to reduce the rate of new Covid infections.
The way to address the labor shortage is to reform our decrepit immigration laws and allow a greater flow of immigrants to enter the United States without flooding the borders with asylum seekers. But efforts at immigration reform have come to a complete halt as partisan sniping has taken the place of responsible legislating. Businesses have a need for more workers, but Congress is mired in partisan diatribes and positioning, so no immigration reform is even considered now.
How do we the citizens break through the immigration reform morass and get the Congress to consider responsible immigration reform to help address the labor shortage that exists all across the United States? How do we get both Republicans and Democrats to make immigration reform a high priority instead of something to loathe as creating ammunition for campaign opponents?
It was not long ago that people like Senator Rubio supported compromise immigration reform, but then he switched in the face of opposition and withdrew his support for an immigration reform package that he helped write. Former president Trump played a major role in killing any immigration reform legislation. But now that he is captivated hiring lawyers for his numerous investigations, both criminal and civil, perhaps he will be sidetracked by efforts at self-preservation and will keep his anti-immigration reform rhetoric to a minimum to allow responsible immigration reform to be considered.
Worker candidates are waiting to gain entry to the U.S. to fill those many available positions. There are young people in Europe, Asia, and Latin America eager to gain lawful entry to the U.S. to apply for those employment positions which have gone wanting by a lack of applicants.
So with Trump sidelined by legal problems of his own creation, perhaps the time is now for Congress to consider serious immigration reform and allow increases in lawful immigration when employers are often desperate to hire workers.
