Posted on 05/08/2019 6:16:25 AM PDT by NobleFree
The recent news on jobs has been great. But the White House seems determined to torpedo it.
The official unemployment rate is the lowest since 1969 and the number of job openings remains high, indicating continued high demand for workers, and wages are increasing. As a restaurant industry lobbyist told the Indianapolis Star recently, “It’s an employee market today. It’s not an employer market. And that’s not going to change for the foreseeable future.”
This is the precondition for drawing more people into the labor market who are currently neither working nor looking for work. And it is sorely needed; the share of prime-working-age men who need to be drawn back into the job market remains unprecedented. As Jason Richwine wrote recently, “With one in nine prime-age males still sitting idle, terms such as ‘full employment’ and ‘labor shortage’ ring hollow. There is much room for improvement.”
A tight labor market isn’t the only thing needed to draw idle men back into the workforce. Changes in welfare and education policies, among other things, would help too. But if a tight labor market isn’t sufficient in itself, it is indispensable.
So what is the White House doing in response to the good economic news? It is taking steps to loosen the labor market, to move toward a buyer’s market in labor (benefitting employers) rather than a seller’s market.
First up is the announcement that the administration will increase the admission of non-farm seasonal workers by 30,000. This is the H-2B visa program, used by landscapers, carnivals, oyster-packers, hotels (including Mar-a-Lago), and others. The equivalent program for farmworkers (called the H-2A visa) also undermines American workers, but since there really are fewer Americans picking fruit, the program’s main effect is to retard mechanization. The H-2B program, on the other hand, is routinely used to fill the kinds of jobs that Americans do every day. BuzzFeed (yes, that BuzzFeed) has done extensive reporting on both the farm and non-farm parts of the visa program, and has written that “many businesses go to extraordinary lengths to skirt the law, deliberately denying jobs to American workers so they can hire foreign workers on H-2 visas instead.”
The H-2B visa shouldn’t exist at all, but at least it’s capped at 66,000 per fiscal year. But for the past several years, Congress has sought to placate lobbyists while shirking responsibility by authorizing, but not requiring, the executive branch to increase the cap for “returning workers” – those who entered on such visas in the past few years. This authorization is usually tucked into spending bill, and in the past couple of years DHS allowed an increase of 15,000. This week, the administration is expected to formally announce a doubling of that to 30,000 extra foreign workers for this year, representing a nearly 50 percent increase in the H-2B program.
Sen. Tom Cotton decried the increase in guest workers, noting that “We should be setting immigration policies that support wage growth and employment for Americans instead of encouraging a race to the bottom by importing low-cost labor.”
Also this week, the White House is briefing Republican senators on the immigration plan put together by Jared Kushner. The plan hasn’t been released yet, but it’s expected to not reduce the number of green cards, at about 1.1 million a year (with changes to the mix of family vs. skilled visas), and to further increase the importation of guest workers, in line with the president’s announced desire for immigration in “the largest numbers ever.”
The details of the proposal will come out soon, and no doubt it will include many necessary and beneficial changes. But how increased importation of foreign workers is consistent with the administration’s “Buy American, Hire American” approach is not clear. Nor is it clear how any of this is supposed to motivate voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan to come out and vote for Trump’s reelection next November.
Mark Krikorian, a nationally recognized expert on immigration issues, has served as Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) since 1995. @MarkSKrikorian
> And that’s not going to change for the foreseeable future.
Famous last words ;-)
National Review published something that actually makes sense! Miracles really do happen!
No. Wrong answer. We need to work at raising the participation rate, which has languished.
Thanks for the years of support, NR. /sar
I think the immigration plan is stupid but I read the NR article as a yet another Trump hit piece from NR
NR is as Trump deranged as the Rats are.
Anyone who isn’t working today is either unwilling to work, or is unemployable. We have reached the point where stable employment is completely optional for our permanent underclass.
Isn’t he the person who Ann Coulter always retweets? I don’t go on her Twitter account anymore.
What do you do with unemployables who get in our way? The cashier at the Dollar Store was working her butt off while a guy outside was asking for spare change. Something doesn’t compute here.
1. Funny how this wasn’t an issue under Obama even as many Millions of Americans were unemployed or underemployed - yet that cheap foreign labor kept coming in.
2. Funny how NeverTrump National Review now suddenly cares about this issue......so long as it provides them an avenue to attack Trump.
Letting in fruit pickers is one thing. Letting in cheap labor for solid paying blue collar jobs like construction or for white collar jobs is quite another. The latter two categories should be filled with Americans first. Foreign labor should be made more expensive in these categories. That way companies will only use it if they actually need it.
The Republican party is 10% corporate/small business cheap labor free traders and 90% regular wage earners. The tail ( the top 10% ) in waging the dog ( the bottom 90%).
Rising wages will do that. DID YOU RED THE ARTICLE?
I know a lot of people think that, and I get why.
My view is a little different. I worked in a field where they actively recruited outside the country... I liked most of my foreign coworkers, and they were quite good, but the fact is that it kept wages flat for many years when they ought to have risen. Wages have to find their natural level again.
That, and I saw (or I think I saw) during the Obama years that people were finding ways to live without working, and that did damage to the work ethic, and most of all it did damage to what young people expect from their lives. The loss of manufacturing did a lot of damage beyond just the loss of the jobs themselves.
I have seen news articles complaining that, because of the tightening of the border, and the tightening of H2B, wages are starting to rise in restaurants and for field workers. That’s a good thing. Democrats are always pushing the idea of raising the minimum wage; I always say, tighten the border and H2B and you won’t even need minimum wage laws.
Most of the change in labor is related to a demographic shit as the boomers retire. This is only going to get worse as the boomer echo is substantially smaller (Our kids will have fewer kids.)
Automation is going to be the answer. Tell your kids to be robot repairmen.
Screw ‘em.
Looking back, my “no” is ambiguous. I’m saying no to an increase of H2B, precisely because it will keep wages from rising. We need a tight job market to bring people back into the work world. That, and kids leaving school (or getting out of the service) will have a hotter job market in which to find their way.
Tighten the border, tighten H2B and you won’t need minimum wage laws. For the last ten years kids have come out of school with no hope of a decent job (college kids working at Starbucks and glad to get it...) because the borders are open and manufacturing has left. Trump is turning that around, and he needs to stay the course.
And the administration is doing its best to keep wages from rising by increasing H-1Bs, H-2Bs, and through its immigration policy proposals. DID YOU READ THE ARTICLE?
All work visa need to end today.
Trump's businesses are dependent on H-2Bs and many of his financial supporters are dependent on H-1Bs. What do you think the chances of that happening are?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.