Solving America’s Two Immigration Crises

The story of immigration in America today is a tale of two crises.

At the top of the public’s mind is crisis number one. Last year, along our southern border, more than 2.5 million undocumented immigrants tried to cross into the United States. Waves of people have overwhelmed limited public resources from El Paso to Chicago to New York and, in the process, evoked fear and frustration from much of the American public.

Crisis number two is less obvious but no less serious. In state after state, employers are crying out for more workers. Millions of jobs are vacant, putting limits on the productivity of businesses, reducing the quality of healthcare services, raising the cost of our homes and restricting the growth of our economy.

The U.S. birthrate has declined 30% in the last 15 years, to the point where Americans are not having enough babies to keep our population growing. This means that America desperately needs workers to staff jobs everywhere, from farms and hospitals to microchip manufacturing plants and biotechnology labs. Without them, America’s economic future will be in peril.

Isn’t there a solution that could address both of these crises simultaneously?

What’s missing in today’s immigration debate is a sensible, humane, and smart way to transmute the supply of people who want to come into the United States into a flow of workers who meet the demands of citizenship in the American economy. What we get instead is the political pettiness we just saw in Washington amid the collapse of a bipartisan border bill in the Senate.

Solely political solutions only exacerbate the problem. Our politicians use immigration issues to gain votes in the short term without regard to the longer-term impact on the nation.

Crisis number one at the border is like a spreading fire, generating political heat, anger, and fear.

Since President Biden took office, the number of people apprehended at the border has risen more than fourfold compared with the average level in the 2010s. In December 2023, officials estimate that at least 300,000 people tried to cross. This surge has created chaos in parts of southern Texas and Arizona, as well as in northern cities where the number of undocumented immigrants is growing fast.

The reason: among the 900 million prospective migrants in the world, the greatest number name the United States as the most desirable destination year after year, according to Gallup polls. Even though Americans are more pessimistic about our future than any time in decades, people the world over continue to see this country as a land of promise and opportunity.

Meanwhile, crisis number two – the nation’s shortage of workers – keeps getting worse. Additional workers are needed in almost every industry, dampening America’s economic growth.

The latest data shows that we have 9.5 million job openings in the United States but only 6.5 million unemployed workers. If every unemployed person in the country found a job, we would still have more than two million jobs open, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Here are some examples of what this means:

• America needs hundreds of thousands more home care workers. This gap threatens the quality of life and the safety of millions of elderly and disabled people. Between 1999 and 2020, enrollment in Medicaid-funded home care programs more than tripled to 3.37 million but the number of home care workers declined by 11.6 %.
• Roughly 2.4 million farm jobs need to be filled annually. But with the number of available farm workers dropping sharply every year, hundreds of thousands of workers are still needed. Without them, farms produce less and data suggests agricultural workforce shortages are one of the reasons we are paying so much more for food.
• A lack of available workers in manufacturing threatens to slow productivity and growth. As of August 2023, there were 616,000 manufacturing jobs that went unfilled at a time when AI promises a great leap in the competitiveness of American factories.
• In the longer term, unless we grow our working age population, America’s entire social safety net for the elderly – which depends on current workers paying taxes to support current retirees’ Social Security and Medicare benefits – could collapse. Under current trends, the trust funds for these programs are projected to be technically insolvent by 2034.

Despite these gaping workforce needs, and the millions of asylum seekers who have entered the country in the last few years, federal law prevents them from legally working entirely for at least half a year after they arrive. It’s hard to imagine a more counterproductive policy than letting people into our country and then refusing them any means to support themselves or their families. Anyone who is in this country – legally or illegally – should have the ability to work.

Ultimately, there are only three possible ways to fill the gap in workers: through more births or increasing the use of robots or though more immigration.

A birth only leads to the creation of a worker after 20 years of expensive investment, parenting, and education. Robotics will help fill in the gaps, but not sufficiently in the near future. Like it or not, that leaves immigration as the most crucial ingredient to America’s continued economic progress and success.

For an alternative future, look at China. Today, China’s population is 1.4 billion. But because it is has a low birthrate and low immigration, its population is projected to decrease to 800 million by the year 2100. China is already suffering significant economic, social and political damage that will continue to grow as its population shrinks.

For America, the solution to its two immigration crises is not hard to fathom. Washington needs to deliver immigration reform that both secures the border to stop illegal immigration while passing legislation that encourages more legal immigration, particularly for people with the skills that this country most desperately needs.

The Cato Institute recently found that all immigrants individually will pay about $267,000 more in local, state and federal taxes than they will consume in benefits over the next 30 years. If the immigrant population were doubled with no change in average age or education, that would be about $11.9 trillion in extra net tax revenue over the next 30 years.

And immigrants don’t just fill the lower rungs of our economy. They are a uniquely motivated and entrepreneurial group of people who are twice as likely to start a new business as native-born Americans. Half of all Fortune 500 companies were started by immigrants or their children.

Alarmingly, the United States immigration system prevents many highly trained and desperately needed PhDs who have received their graduate education here from remaining in the United States after graduation – despite their desire to do so. There is no shortage of ways to creatively attract these talented people. Imagine a system, for example, where we bid out H1-B visas to the worthiest, letting market forces decide their price. Instead, we are increasingly shutting these talented people out entirely.

While Americans increasingly worry about illegal immigration, polls show that 68% still think immigration is a good thing for America compared to just 27% who think it’s a bad thing. Most Americans know deep down that attracting hardworking and enterprising people from around the world to come here makes us all stronger.

Amid this presidential campaign year, where each party will be tempted to demonize the other over the immigration issue, it’s hard to imagine a solution to these twin crises. But if our leaders can summon the courage and the foresight to secure our border and fix our immigration system, they could help secure America’s economic future for generations to come and very likely gain widespread public support.