I think a solid, politically realistic solution for high-skilled immigration is just to have a fixed number of visas that are sorted by worker salary. This way companies can compete & pay workers what they value them at, rather than having the government try to set wage minimums by category (which they do now with the H1-B program). If there are say 100,000 annual visas, the very first visa is awarded to the worker with the highest salary offer- say some FAANG AI developer making a couple million a year. The 100k visas are then distributed to correspondingly lower salary offers, until they're all used up.
This ensures the visa holders are fairly compensated, and preserves the idea that we're only offering visas for very skilled, highly-compensated workers. Which hopefully should make the idea more palatable for voters. It also makes sure that we're getting the best & brightest from other countries. And, that the market is determining who's smart and who isn't- not the government. Right now the H1-B visa is run by a lottery (literally!), so some brilliant people get in, some brilliant people don't, and some not super-bright folks get in and then work for consulting shops. Completely random and a terrible system
Nice idea. I would add as a corollary that visas should all include some reasonable path to citizenship. One of the biggest issues for H1-B holders today is that even if they win the lottery and get to work here, they can stay 10+ years and still not have a path to a green card or eventual citizenship.
Completely agree and would add that they shouldn't be so absolutely dependent on the company sponsoring the visa. Start with 3 months and then add a month for every year they are in the US to find another job if they lose the job at their initial sponsor.
You could just auction the visas. That would offset any tendency to hire foreigners because they are willing to work more cheaply in exchange for the right to immigrate
It doesn’t work because top of the band salary varies a lot based on the industry. It does not make sense to only allow tech and finance companies to take advantage of skilled immigration. It’s better to tweak the formula for prevailing wages to exclude people who earn in the top 10% of their profession from the H-1B and EB green card quotas.
This is a fair point. For example scientists are paid considerably less than software developers. You'd probably have to do multiple categories, like 1 auction for tech, 1 for science, etc.
Hopefully you don't need to wait until the end of the year to find out if your salary offer was one of the 100,000 highest to find out whether you can enter the country. But maybe it can be done on a weekly or monthly rolling basis.
I'm all for getting as much of the labor we need in the good full employment environment we have in this nation via immigration. My ideal is not to pick and choose sectors that should get the benefit, but if the politics demand something short of that, well that's politics and I won't let perfect be the enemy of good.
I generally agree and that’s why I included that last section about how this should apply to more job markets. But in an industry with this much public investment, and such pronounced worker shortages, it seems like clean energy is a good place to start.
I have a suggestion for another column on a clean energy development question to which I have never found a satisfactory answer: why do Americans pay $2.80-$3.65 per Watt of installed rooftop solar while Australians pay less than $1 per Watt? I can't believe it's only a matter of "too much regulation" in the US, although AUS has very deliberately created a fast and easy solar permitting scheme. It can't be labor rates per se, since installers in AUS earn as much or more than installers in the US. There is something about the way the two markets have been structured, encouraged, subsidized, managed, regulated, etc. that has created his huge divergence, and I am pretty sure we in the US are not getting whatever it is we're paying for with the 300% markup. Rooftop solar is obviously not a panacea and it creates economic distortions across income levels in states like California that do not (yet) separately bill utility users for non-variable operating costs and energy production/acquisition costs. But demand reduction at the residential and commercial level through the deployment of rooftop solar reduces transmission / distribution burdens, reduces brown-out/blackout risk and generally reduces the time pressure on hard-to-build upstream energy production projects. More of it seems like a net benefit, so reducing the installation cost does too.
It's perplexing to me that rooftop solar (especially with battery backup) is so often dismissed as a potentially major contributor to reducing our CO2 emissions. It seems like a no brainer, since large-scale adoption of rooftop solar would eliminate the pesky problem of having to install all those transmission lines. Even at twice the installation cost, rooftop solar just makes sense. If we reduce the cost by emulating whatever Australia is doing, we absolutely should.
The benefits of rooftop are almost always pitched on the basis of private gains — reductions in the owner’s utility bill. This has been a great driver of installs in states with high electricity charges (California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, etc.). The social benefits of incremental installs are largely compensated for by the public subsidies at both the state and federal levels. But the combination of high solar install costs, high electricity prices and generous subsidies have left the market at a bad equilibrium point. Now the primary driver of new installs is high electricity pricing, which is bad economically, and the primary impact of solar defection by those who can afford to install it is to shift a greater share of fixed costs for maintaining the grid onto those who don't have solar, which drives volumetric rates per kWh ever higher. It's a real mess.
If we could lower the cost of solar installs to AUS levels, we would make solar vastly cheaper for more people, which would both reduce upstream generation / transmission challenges AND force PUCs to deal with the ongoing conundrum of how best to allocate the costs of grid maintenance, which are high and growing, even without increases in electricity usage.
The article you linked to appears to indicate that the issue is training, not lack of people. It’s also a skillset that can be trained for relatively quickly.
Given that we have a huge issue with people already here not having good jobs, and a relatively low labor participation rate, why would we go to immigration first? This seems like a place to upskill our existing workforce.
There are practical tradeoffs to balance with that, of course. If the job doesn't require speaking English and/or a college degree, then people have to choose to either let those jobs go unfilled and have fewer goods and services, or let go of those demands.
Given that English is the international lingua franca with 2 billion people who can speak it at least reasonably well, it’s not an unreasonable requirement.
I’m very pro-immigration in general, but when discussing labor market tightness, I would probably note that current male prime age labor force participation is way below historical levels.
If we had male prime age lfpr like we did in the 60s, that’d be about 5 million additional men in the workforce.
Maybe don’t specifically target your immigration proposal at blue collar workers in the trades?
EDIT: I’d also note what’s going on with real wages for electricians. Per FRED, they haven’t gone up for at least the last 20 years.
Ben, kudos for *addressing* the political side of the political economy:
"His preferred solution isn’t to just attract foreign workers; it’s to expand job training programs and widen the base of workers that are employed in the manufacturing and construction sector. For example, he said “we’ve got millions of women in this country who we could potentially reach out to and say, you know what, there's actually a pathway for you in the construction industry.” ...
If we do that, Walsh admits that he’s open to a conversation about expanding foreign skilled based immigration in the clean energy sector — as long as the jobs offered under the visa program don’t exploit foreign workers or undermine the rights and wages of American workers."
Progress, but you're not there yet! The next step is to *center* the politics. Walsh is not dumb—he knows he is talking to someone more excited about immigration that upskilling, and his base *hates* immigration. So "open to a conversation" should tell you how far you have to go, not that you've arrived. The good policy ideas are trivial: what's hard is moving the political system out of its current anti-immigrant equilibrium despite all the veto points resisting such movement. Providing constructive hypotheses of how change will happen is the work to do, not sketching how beautiful that unreachable world would be.
I agree generally, but don't necessarily believe that the current anti-immigration equilibrium is anti well-managed legal immigration. Public reaction to the absolute shit-show goat rodeo that is our asylum system is understandable, but not necessarily indicative of longer term support for legal immigration, especially if targeted toward areas of economic growth and public benefit.
The article doesn’t appear to require electricians. If I understand it correctly, it’s technicians, and in a job that can be trained for relatively quickly.
Don't understand the comment. I think immigration IS the best way to find many or most of the electricians we need, and I don't think that generalized "anti-immigration" political sentiment will prevent it if is done programatically / legally.
I know right ..electrician is one of those many jobs Americans won't do anymore.
I mean heaven forbid we should advertise to Americans that we're offering training, good wages, a solid 20-30 year career path to middle class security with portable skills that one could even perhaps start a business with eventually.
Why try to make the job attractive and remunerative when there's a mass of helot workers who don't demand any of those things?
From the stats I can find, real wages for electricians have been stagnant for some time. Doesn’t really feel like a labor market bumping up against hard supply constraints.
Might be a regional thing. I own a small business in Vermont, and there are very few electricians up here, or plumbers, for that matter. The ones who are here are mostly working for themselves or their family business.
Look I hire tradesmen a great deal in my job. If you know most of them actually make...when you subtract time looking at jobs, time driving to and from jobs, time between jobs, to and from Home Depot or ABC, time injured (many don't have health insurance or worker's comp) time working under the master electrician, they do OK but they don't do nearly as well as you think. Furthermore most hit their peak earnings fairly quickly.
The ones making the real money are the business owners who let the young bucks slither around in attics, moldy basements and crawl spaces..knocking out old walls (maybe with lead and asbestos and other what not). It's hard on your body.
Like most trades, with few exceptions, it used to be better before much of the union work went away and then zone was flooded with cheaper foreign workers who have much more modest expectations about health and retirement security.
Bottom line...if you can't find Americans to do a job, it's because that job is not attractive enough.
Again, if I read the source article correctly, it’s technicians, not electricians, and jobs that can be trained for relatively quickly.
Given that many people are struggling to get better jobs, maybe we should start with training the people already here and then evaluate whether or not we have enough.
I had a weird/funny idea pitched to me the other day by a single friend who is heading into the passport bro world to find a life partner. He thinks we should increase immigration of “passport gals” from other countries that would be willing to marry lower status American males who are having a hard time in the dating pool. This would probably be unpopular with…lots of people? But my guess is the average guy would just be like “oh cool”.
Spousal visas are only available to people already married (CR/IR-1) or engaged (K-1) to an American. This proposal as written sounds slightly different. He wants to bring women here, have them meet a man here, and then get married. More convenient that way, presumably.
Not endorsing, but to implement: Imagine if you dramatically increased the number of J-1 visas issued for au pairs, but also strictly enforced the limitations on that visa and actually deported recipients who overstayed, but still allowed adjustment of status if they got married. You’d have lots more women coming to the US every year looking to meet a man and get married in a hurry so they wouldn’t have to leave after 1-2 years.
There is already plenty of incentive for a foreign born woman in the country to marry a citizen. Like most of us, they don't always settle for someone who they don't like. Citizenship benefits notwithstanding.
A Canada-style points based system would be a good starting point. The H1-B visa is problematic insofar as it ties the skilled immigrant worker to a specific employee, thereby minimizing wage negotiation power. Furthermore, it cuts across the intent of the recent FTC decision to ban non-compete provisions in employee contracts.
Let's just offer green cards in those areas where we are suffering from skilled domestic labour shortages.
I'd like to adopt a points system. But I also think we should modify the existing H1-B program. Why not allow such visa holders to leave for a better job after, say, six months (or a year)?
My general philosophy regarding immigration is to incentivize low-skill immigration to work lower-skill, lower-pay jobs, while training Americans to do higher-skill, higher-pay jobs. But to the extent that there is a shortage of Americans to do said higher-skill jobs, we should absolutely allow immigrants who will perform that work
That’s going to increase inequality among the native born population, by undercutting wages for Americans who don’t advance to higher paying jobs, while reducing prices for those who do get higher pay. If you do the opposite, allow in highly skilled high paid immigrants, that decreases inequality, by undercutting wages for highly paid Americans and reducing prices for those who get lower pay.
Undercutting wages / increasing competition for lower-skilled lower-income Americans feeds political opposition to immigration generally, while high-skilled high-wage immigration does not. Trump voters don't really care that 50% of American "unicorn" start-ups are founded by immigrants, for example.
I’m just not sure the politics will actually work in your favor on this one.
It likely won’t take much of “massive public expenditure goes to foreign workers” to turn people against immigration even more. If we show we try to reskill people here first, it may be more workable.
Not saying it’s a bad idea. It may just need a bit more time and other things tried first.
That’s my thought as well. We have a lot of underemployed people and our labor force participation rate hasn’t fully recovered. Shouldn’t we first go to the people who are here, and then see how many more we actually need?
Blue collar wages have been increasing for less than a decade after four decades of stagnation. Talk about labor shortages is premature and should be deferred until capital gets a far smaller share of the pie.
I love the idea but the politics seem really hard. The premise of the column seems to implicitly assume that Biden will be reelected, otherwise we’re probably not expecting Trump to take up the banner here. So for Biden to take a step that would surely be opposed by organized labor (electrical workers unions) seems way out of character. I could see this as part of a bigger immigration deal with lots of get-tough on the Southern border aspects, but in that case why not just go for the bigger win and expand legal skilled immigration across the entire economy rather than just one sector? Narrowly, for the purpose of clean energy, why not something to allow rapid retraining of laid-off workers (maybe throw something in about workers displaced by AI?) in clean energy, perhaps with a more restrictive certification that would allow them to do clean energy work but not other electrician work, which might appease organized labor to a degree and make the training simpler.
I think the point is that we have historically low unemployment, high labor force participation, an aging population that is aging / retiring even faster in the building trades AND a projected shortage of hundred of thousands to millions of workers in critical sectors. It's not clear to me why unions would not welcome the prospect of millions of new members, regardless of their national origin or even their temporary / conditional immigration status.
I think the prime working age LFPR is hovering around 83.5, which is the highest since before the great recession (and we have only ever been above 84 for a few years in the late ‘90s) so not clear there is a lot of space there. I believe good wages in these jobs could pull in more under-employed people, and the trend for young people in building trades is encouraging.
I think the politics of this could be tricky in selling it to the American public. My suggestion around that would be to have immigrants pay higher taxes. Say bump them up one tax bracket and require companies to pay a surcharge of (3%-5%) more on their SS/Medicare taxes with no cap.
For immigrants coming to the US its likely still a great opportunity, it incentivizes companies to find US workers when possible. When they can't, US workers will know that immigrants are helping to fund the US government more so they don't have to...
If/once they become a citizen (say after 10 years), this would drop off and wouldn't apply to their children who are US citizens by birth.
It would be really ironic if we simultaneously banned TikTok, for national security reasons, while also importing a million Chinese workers to build the new energy infrastructure.
I am excited to hear about the Heartland visa program. I think it's regional and opt-in nature has the potential to allow the U.S. to emulate some aspects of the more broadly supported Canadian immigration system. Place-based visas addressing gaps can highlight the benefits of immigration and make it easier to strike local bargains by giving a level of control. It won't be a miracle, Canada is experiencing an immigration backlash tied to not having built enough housing, but it seems politically astute.
In a more rational world, I would suggest there could be some sort of conditions to be met on a job opening before a company could try to fill it with an immigrant worker to try to alleviate the political backlash - say, unfilled for a year and if it doesn't require a college degree there must be training available. It would be less efficient, but theoretically more politically acceptable because then it would guarantee the jobs aren't being taken from an American.
In this world though, I doubt anything that detailed would make a dent in the political backlash. Fearmongers gonna fearmonger.
Construction jobs are great, but there is also a major nursing shortage in this country, especially with new requirements for staffing and an aging population.. The Philippines have been a major source of health care workers. I imagine there are other countries that could also contribute.
I realized that this is somewhat peripheral to construction jobs and energy, but drawing women into construction does decrease the pool of potential nurses. And having enough nurses should be politically popular, which might carry along increased immigration in other trades.
I think a solid, politically realistic solution for high-skilled immigration is just to have a fixed number of visas that are sorted by worker salary. This way companies can compete & pay workers what they value them at, rather than having the government try to set wage minimums by category (which they do now with the H1-B program). If there are say 100,000 annual visas, the very first visa is awarded to the worker with the highest salary offer- say some FAANG AI developer making a couple million a year. The 100k visas are then distributed to correspondingly lower salary offers, until they're all used up.
This ensures the visa holders are fairly compensated, and preserves the idea that we're only offering visas for very skilled, highly-compensated workers. Which hopefully should make the idea more palatable for voters. It also makes sure that we're getting the best & brightest from other countries. And, that the market is determining who's smart and who isn't- not the government. Right now the H1-B visa is run by a lottery (literally!), so some brilliant people get in, some brilliant people don't, and some not super-bright folks get in and then work for consulting shops. Completely random and a terrible system
Nice idea. I would add as a corollary that visas should all include some reasonable path to citizenship. One of the biggest issues for H1-B holders today is that even if they win the lottery and get to work here, they can stay 10+ years and still not have a path to a green card or eventual citizenship.
Completely agree and would add that they shouldn't be so absolutely dependent on the company sponsoring the visa. Start with 3 months and then add a month for every year they are in the US to find another job if they lose the job at their initial sponsor.
You could just auction the visas. That would offset any tendency to hire foreigners because they are willing to work more cheaply in exchange for the right to immigrate
It doesn’t work because top of the band salary varies a lot based on the industry. It does not make sense to only allow tech and finance companies to take advantage of skilled immigration. It’s better to tweak the formula for prevailing wages to exclude people who earn in the top 10% of their profession from the H-1B and EB green card quotas.
This is a fair point. For example scientists are paid considerably less than software developers. You'd probably have to do multiple categories, like 1 auction for tech, 1 for science, etc.
I foresee a lot of "no, this guy is definitely going to be doing real basic science on financial derivatives markets".
Hopefully you don't need to wait until the end of the year to find out if your salary offer was one of the 100,000 highest to find out whether you can enter the country. But maybe it can be done on a weekly or monthly rolling basis.
I'm all for getting as much of the labor we need in the good full employment environment we have in this nation via immigration. My ideal is not to pick and choose sectors that should get the benefit, but if the politics demand something short of that, well that's politics and I won't let perfect be the enemy of good.
I generally agree and that’s why I included that last section about how this should apply to more job markets. But in an industry with this much public investment, and such pronounced worker shortages, it seems like clean energy is a good place to start.
I have a suggestion for another column on a clean energy development question to which I have never found a satisfactory answer: why do Americans pay $2.80-$3.65 per Watt of installed rooftop solar while Australians pay less than $1 per Watt? I can't believe it's only a matter of "too much regulation" in the US, although AUS has very deliberately created a fast and easy solar permitting scheme. It can't be labor rates per se, since installers in AUS earn as much or more than installers in the US. There is something about the way the two markets have been structured, encouraged, subsidized, managed, regulated, etc. that has created his huge divergence, and I am pretty sure we in the US are not getting whatever it is we're paying for with the 300% markup. Rooftop solar is obviously not a panacea and it creates economic distortions across income levels in states like California that do not (yet) separately bill utility users for non-variable operating costs and energy production/acquisition costs. But demand reduction at the residential and commercial level through the deployment of rooftop solar reduces transmission / distribution burdens, reduces brown-out/blackout risk and generally reduces the time pressure on hard-to-build upstream energy production projects. More of it seems like a net benefit, so reducing the installation cost does too.
It's perplexing to me that rooftop solar (especially with battery backup) is so often dismissed as a potentially major contributor to reducing our CO2 emissions. It seems like a no brainer, since large-scale adoption of rooftop solar would eliminate the pesky problem of having to install all those transmission lines. Even at twice the installation cost, rooftop solar just makes sense. If we reduce the cost by emulating whatever Australia is doing, we absolutely should.
The benefits of rooftop are almost always pitched on the basis of private gains — reductions in the owner’s utility bill. This has been a great driver of installs in states with high electricity charges (California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, etc.). The social benefits of incremental installs are largely compensated for by the public subsidies at both the state and federal levels. But the combination of high solar install costs, high electricity prices and generous subsidies have left the market at a bad equilibrium point. Now the primary driver of new installs is high electricity pricing, which is bad economically, and the primary impact of solar defection by those who can afford to install it is to shift a greater share of fixed costs for maintaining the grid onto those who don't have solar, which drives volumetric rates per kWh ever higher. It's a real mess.
If we could lower the cost of solar installs to AUS levels, we would make solar vastly cheaper for more people, which would both reduce upstream generation / transmission challenges AND force PUCs to deal with the ongoing conundrum of how best to allocate the costs of grid maintenance, which are high and growing, even without increases in electricity usage.
The article you linked to appears to indicate that the issue is training, not lack of people. It’s also a skillset that can be trained for relatively quickly.
Given that we have a huge issue with people already here not having good jobs, and a relatively low labor participation rate, why would we go to immigration first? This seems like a place to upskill our existing workforce.
There are practical tradeoffs to balance with that, of course. If the job doesn't require speaking English and/or a college degree, then people have to choose to either let those jobs go unfilled and have fewer goods and services, or let go of those demands.
Given that English is the international lingua franca with 2 billion people who can speak it at least reasonably well, it’s not an unreasonable requirement.
It's generally not widely taught where most of our immigrants come from though.
The reasonableness likely is variable over time based on the supply of immigrant labor.
I’m very pro-immigration in general, but when discussing labor market tightness, I would probably note that current male prime age labor force participation is way below historical levels.
If we had male prime age lfpr like we did in the 60s, that’d be about 5 million additional men in the workforce.
Maybe don’t specifically target your immigration proposal at blue collar workers in the trades?
EDIT: I’d also note what’s going on with real wages for electricians. Per FRED, they haven’t gone up for at least the last 20 years.
Ben, kudos for *addressing* the political side of the political economy:
"His preferred solution isn’t to just attract foreign workers; it’s to expand job training programs and widen the base of workers that are employed in the manufacturing and construction sector. For example, he said “we’ve got millions of women in this country who we could potentially reach out to and say, you know what, there's actually a pathway for you in the construction industry.” ...
If we do that, Walsh admits that he’s open to a conversation about expanding foreign skilled based immigration in the clean energy sector — as long as the jobs offered under the visa program don’t exploit foreign workers or undermine the rights and wages of American workers."
Progress, but you're not there yet! The next step is to *center* the politics. Walsh is not dumb—he knows he is talking to someone more excited about immigration that upskilling, and his base *hates* immigration. So "open to a conversation" should tell you how far you have to go, not that you've arrived. The good policy ideas are trivial: what's hard is moving the political system out of its current anti-immigrant equilibrium despite all the veto points resisting such movement. Providing constructive hypotheses of how change will happen is the work to do, not sketching how beautiful that unreachable world would be.
I agree generally, but don't necessarily believe that the current anti-immigration equilibrium is anti well-managed legal immigration. Public reaction to the absolute shit-show goat rodeo that is our asylum system is understandable, but not necessarily indicative of longer term support for legal immigration, especially if targeted toward areas of economic growth and public benefit.
If you have any better ideas on how to find one million electricians in six years, we’re listening
The article doesn’t appear to require electricians. If I understand it correctly, it’s technicians, and in a job that can be trained for relatively quickly.
Don't understand the comment. I think immigration IS the best way to find many or most of the electricians we need, and I don't think that generalized "anti-immigration" political sentiment will prevent it if is done programatically / legally.
Sorry I meant to reply to another comment above
Solution to all public problems: MOAR IMMIGRATION!!!
Immigration for Left neoliberal crowd is beginning to occupy the space in mental universe that tax cuts do on the right.
If you have any better ideas on how to find one million electricians in six years, we’re listening
I’m pro-immigration, but isn’t the easy answer to this question American men, ages 25-54, who aren’t currently working?
If we got male prime age lfpr back to 1960s levels that would be about 5 million additional workers.
I know right ..electrician is one of those many jobs Americans won't do anymore.
I mean heaven forbid we should advertise to Americans that we're offering training, good wages, a solid 20-30 year career path to middle class security with portable skills that one could even perhaps start a business with eventually.
Why try to make the job attractive and remunerative when there's a mass of helot workers who don't demand any of those things?
Electricians make damn good bank already. There are not enough of them...I can't get any to return a phone call, much less stop by and fix a thing.
From the stats I can find, real wages for electricians have been stagnant for some time. Doesn’t really feel like a labor market bumping up against hard supply constraints.
Might be a regional thing. I own a small business in Vermont, and there are very few electricians up here, or plumbers, for that matter. The ones who are here are mostly working for themselves or their family business.
Look I hire tradesmen a great deal in my job. If you know most of them actually make...when you subtract time looking at jobs, time driving to and from jobs, time between jobs, to and from Home Depot or ABC, time injured (many don't have health insurance or worker's comp) time working under the master electrician, they do OK but they don't do nearly as well as you think. Furthermore most hit their peak earnings fairly quickly.
The ones making the real money are the business owners who let the young bucks slither around in attics, moldy basements and crawl spaces..knocking out old walls (maybe with lead and asbestos and other what not). It's hard on your body.
Like most trades, with few exceptions, it used to be better before much of the union work went away and then zone was flooded with cheaper foreign workers who have much more modest expectations about health and retirement security.
Bottom line...if you can't find Americans to do a job, it's because that job is not attractive enough.
I don’t have any trouble finding an electrician, although I might have to wait for the appointment. Might be regional.
Again, if I read the source article correctly, it’s technicians, not electricians, and jobs that can be trained for relatively quickly.
Given that many people are struggling to get better jobs, maybe we should start with training the people already here and then evaluate whether or not we have enough.
High immigration has tradeoffs like any other policy.. which is to say it's definitely NOT very analogous to picking up a S 20 bill on the ground..
I had a weird/funny idea pitched to me the other day by a single friend who is heading into the passport bro world to find a life partner. He thinks we should increase immigration of “passport gals” from other countries that would be willing to marry lower status American males who are having a hard time in the dating pool. This would probably be unpopular with…lots of people? But my guess is the average guy would just be like “oh cool”.
Don't we already do that through the spousal visa program?
Spousal visas are only available to people already married (CR/IR-1) or engaged (K-1) to an American. This proposal as written sounds slightly different. He wants to bring women here, have them meet a man here, and then get married. More convenient that way, presumably.
Not endorsing, but to implement: Imagine if you dramatically increased the number of J-1 visas issued for au pairs, but also strictly enforced the limitations on that visa and actually deported recipients who overstayed, but still allowed adjustment of status if they got married. You’d have lots more women coming to the US every year looking to meet a man and get married in a hurry so they wouldn’t have to leave after 1-2 years.
There is already plenty of incentive for a foreign born woman in the country to marry a citizen. Like most of us, they don't always settle for someone who they don't like. Citizenship benefits notwithstanding.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can already get a mail-order bride if that's your thing; although it sounds like you're proposing...a subsidy for that?
A Canada-style points based system would be a good starting point. The H1-B visa is problematic insofar as it ties the skilled immigrant worker to a specific employee, thereby minimizing wage negotiation power. Furthermore, it cuts across the intent of the recent FTC decision to ban non-compete provisions in employee contracts.
Let's just offer green cards in those areas where we are suffering from skilled domestic labour shortages.
I'd like to adopt a points system. But I also think we should modify the existing H1-B program. Why not allow such visa holders to leave for a better job after, say, six months (or a year)?
My general philosophy regarding immigration is to incentivize low-skill immigration to work lower-skill, lower-pay jobs, while training Americans to do higher-skill, higher-pay jobs. But to the extent that there is a shortage of Americans to do said higher-skill jobs, we should absolutely allow immigrants who will perform that work
That’s going to increase inequality among the native born population, by undercutting wages for Americans who don’t advance to higher paying jobs, while reducing prices for those who do get higher pay. If you do the opposite, allow in highly skilled high paid immigrants, that decreases inequality, by undercutting wages for highly paid Americans and reducing prices for those who get lower pay.
And why are either of those outcomes a problem?
Undercutting wages / increasing competition for lower-skilled lower-income Americans feeds political opposition to immigration generally, while high-skilled high-wage immigration does not. Trump voters don't really care that 50% of American "unicorn" start-ups are founded by immigrants, for example.
I’m just not sure the politics will actually work in your favor on this one.
It likely won’t take much of “massive public expenditure goes to foreign workers” to turn people against immigration even more. If we show we try to reskill people here first, it may be more workable.
Not saying it’s a bad idea. It may just need a bit more time and other things tried first.
That’s my thought as well. We have a lot of underemployed people and our labor force participation rate hasn’t fully recovered. Shouldn’t we first go to the people who are here, and then see how many more we actually need?
Blue collar wages have been increasing for less than a decade after four decades of stagnation. Talk about labor shortages is premature and should be deferred until capital gets a far smaller share of the pie.
I love the idea but the politics seem really hard. The premise of the column seems to implicitly assume that Biden will be reelected, otherwise we’re probably not expecting Trump to take up the banner here. So for Biden to take a step that would surely be opposed by organized labor (electrical workers unions) seems way out of character. I could see this as part of a bigger immigration deal with lots of get-tough on the Southern border aspects, but in that case why not just go for the bigger win and expand legal skilled immigration across the entire economy rather than just one sector? Narrowly, for the purpose of clean energy, why not something to allow rapid retraining of laid-off workers (maybe throw something in about workers displaced by AI?) in clean energy, perhaps with a more restrictive certification that would allow them to do clean energy work but not other electrician work, which might appease organized labor to a degree and make the training simpler.
I think the point is that we have historically low unemployment, high labor force participation, an aging population that is aging / retiring even faster in the building trades AND a projected shortage of hundred of thousands to millions of workers in critical sectors. It's not clear to me why unions would not welcome the prospect of millions of new members, regardless of their national origin or even their temporary / conditional immigration status.
Our labor force participation isn’t particularly high at the moment. We have plenty of room to grow and lots of underemployed people.
I also do not expect older people to retire nearly as quickly as they have in the past.
And we currently have an increase of younger people going into the trades.
I think the prime working age LFPR is hovering around 83.5, which is the highest since before the great recession (and we have only ever been above 84 for a few years in the late ‘90s) so not clear there is a lot of space there. I believe good wages in these jobs could pull in more under-employed people, and the trend for young people in building trades is encouraging.
Men’s prime age labor force participation is actually lower than historical levels, which were at 98% in 1954 and are currently around 89%. See a pretty interesting discussion at https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/why-some-prime-age-men-are-out-of-work/
Essentially, we have room to grow.
Will read - thanks
I think the politics of this could be tricky in selling it to the American public. My suggestion around that would be to have immigrants pay higher taxes. Say bump them up one tax bracket and require companies to pay a surcharge of (3%-5%) more on their SS/Medicare taxes with no cap.
For immigrants coming to the US its likely still a great opportunity, it incentivizes companies to find US workers when possible. When they can't, US workers will know that immigrants are helping to fund the US government more so they don't have to...
If/once they become a citizen (say after 10 years), this would drop off and wouldn't apply to their children who are US citizens by birth.
It would be really ironic if we simultaneously banned TikTok, for national security reasons, while also importing a million Chinese workers to build the new energy infrastructure.
I am excited to hear about the Heartland visa program. I think it's regional and opt-in nature has the potential to allow the U.S. to emulate some aspects of the more broadly supported Canadian immigration system. Place-based visas addressing gaps can highlight the benefits of immigration and make it easier to strike local bargains by giving a level of control. It won't be a miracle, Canada is experiencing an immigration backlash tied to not having built enough housing, but it seems politically astute.
In a more rational world, I would suggest there could be some sort of conditions to be met on a job opening before a company could try to fill it with an immigrant worker to try to alleviate the political backlash - say, unfilled for a year and if it doesn't require a college degree there must be training available. It would be less efficient, but theoretically more politically acceptable because then it would guarantee the jobs aren't being taken from an American.
In this world though, I doubt anything that detailed would make a dent in the political backlash. Fearmongers gonna fearmonger.
Construction jobs are great, but there is also a major nursing shortage in this country, especially with new requirements for staffing and an aging population.. The Philippines have been a major source of health care workers. I imagine there are other countries that could also contribute.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/04/24/1246628171/nursing-home-staffing-final-rule-medicare-medicaid
I realized that this is somewhat peripheral to construction jobs and energy, but drawing women into construction does decrease the pool of potential nurses. And having enough nurses should be politically popular, which might carry along increased immigration in other trades.