To ease worker shortages the editors of the Washington Post urge President Biden to speed up the approval process for legal immigration:
President Biden insists he is doing everything he can to lower inflation and keep the economy strong. But he has yet to take an obvious — and much-needed — step to fix the legal immigration system.
There are 9.5 million people waiting for their legal immigration paperwork to be processed by the U.S. government. These include people seeking work permits, asylum, green cards and citizenship. It’s an unprecedented backlog. Some people trying to renew temporary work permits are waiting so long that they are losing their right to work legally, meaning they lose their jobs and income. In all, people waiting for employment authorization or reauthorization make up about 1.6 million of the backlogged applications. They are ready and able to work, yet government bureaucracy is in the way. This is a major loss for the U.S. economy.
I completely agree that the process should be sped up. However, I do have some reservations about some of their claims.
For example, is a labor force participation rate of 62% worse than one of 63%? I think it depends on the reasons that underpin the decline. In addition I think that asserting that speeding up the review process for application for legal immigration will improve our employment situation is a stretch. It depends entirely on what the labor shortages are and who the prospective legal immigrants are. Just to take one example, bringing in 1 million agricultural workers or computer programmers will do little about a shortfall of welders. It will, however, tend to reduce the wages of agricultural workers or computer programmers.
I wish the editors had broken down the headline number of 9.5 million a bit. How many of those affected by the slowness of the process are people seeking work permits, asylum applicants, green card applicants, and applications for citizenship, respectively? A little factoid. Over the period of the last 30 years the rate at which asylum applications have been approved has never been above 50%. Right now just about 2/3s of such applications are denied. In other words to some degree bogus asylum claims are clogging up the system. The way to deal with that is to reduce the number of bogus applications by weeding them out much more quickly, preferably at the point at which they are made. The present, inefficient and ineffective system actually incentivizes bogus claims.
I dont know what it is like with lower end employees but with the subspecialists I am hiring on H1Bs there is lots of paperwork and it takes quite a while. For the last few years we have all been terrified that if we screwed up some arcane piece of paperwork we would lose a person we desperately needed. I am particularly pissed at how hard it is to hire a Canadian. Their training system is just like ours and they have quality people. What the hell? Anyway, we hired the best immigration lawyers we could find and pay them lots of money. Great fix.
Steve
IMO, there is no rhyme or reason to our immigration policies, as they are so riddled with the momentary politics favoring the party currently in power.
We’ve been involved with helping 3 people achieve legal status, and in each case the process was different. One young man had his paperwork repeatedly “lost†by the government, eventually applying for DACA status to achieve some kind of stable presence in this country. One man finally got his green card following a many year wait time. The third man went through the various immigration hoops in a more timely manner, and is now an American citizen – proudly putting an American flag on t-shirts advertising the construction company he owns. In every one of these cases, though, where people chose a legitimate route of working here the bureaucratic gauntlet was erratic and difficult to maneuver. Basically, under the Biden presidency, which literally waves people in, unobstructed except by their own ability to reach our southern border, there is little incentive to participate in legally applying for working, living or becoming a citizen of this country.
“For the last few years we have all been terrified that if we screwed up some arcane piece of paperwork we would lose a person we desperately needed. I am particularly pissed at how hard it is to hire a Canadian. ”
Ask your party. Otherwise quit-yer-bitchen.