Immigrants could help the US labor shortage -- if the government would let them

[Jilly_in_VA]

Amid nationwide labor shortages in critical industries, more than a million immigrants are waiting on the US government to issue them work permits. Without these permits, many could lose their jobs, and some already have.

Biraj Nepal, a Nepali asylum seeker living in Woodland, California, has been working as a software engineer in the IT department of a bank for the last four years. Nepal went on unpaid administrative leave starting on January 26 because his work permit expired and the government has yet to process his renewal application. That has left his employer in a lurch: There’s long been a shortage of IT workers, and the pandemic accelerated that trend as companies went remote. Now, nearly a third of IT executives say that the search for qualified employees has gotten “significantly harder.”

If Nepal isn’t issued a new work permit within 90 days of taking administrative leave, his company will, by law, no longer be able to hold his job for him and will likely look for a contractor to fill his role. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn’t be a concern; work permits are meant to be issued quickly so that immigrants can be self-sufficient even while they are waiting on other applications for visas and green cards, which can take months or years to process. But the backlog at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has reached crisis level.

“It’s a critical situation here. I’m in a financial crisis,” Nepal said. “We are being punished by the government without doing any crime.”

It only takes about 12 minutes for an official to review an application for a work permit, but an overstretched USCIS still hasn’t been able to keep up. It’s a symptom of broader dysfunction in America’s legal immigration system, which has not seen major reform in decades and was a target of former President Donald Trump.

USCIS is now taking about eight months to a year to issue work permits at the National Benefits Center, its main processing center. Federal law directs that the agency take no longer than 180 days to process those applications. It was abiding by that timeframe pre-pandemic, but that’s not a hard legal requirement. It’s taking so long to issue new permits that, according to the latest available data from the agency, the backlog stood at more than 1.48 million pending applications as of the end of September. The agency doesn’t track the number of people who have lost their jobs as a result.

This bureaucratic backlog is a problem for immigrants who are applying for work permits for the first time and for those who are seeking to renew their employment authorization. The permits are typically valid for two years and some can be automatically extended for 180 days, but after that, an immigrant can no longer legally work.

The delay is affecting a range of immigrants, from asylum seekers to beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. There were nearly 11 million open jobs as of the end of December, many in industries ranging from tech to trucking that need every worker they can get right now. Those industries heavily rely on immigrant workers, and due to pandemic-era policies that have prevented some 2 million new immigrants from coming to the US, the available supply of those workers is smaller than it otherwise would be. The US needs to leverage its existing immigrant workforce, but the work permit backlog is standing in the way.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22933223/work-permit-uscis-backlog-immigration-labor-shortage
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They might also *ahem* become US citizens!

[Pantagruel]

1. Anyone examine

staffing differences at USCIS under Obama v. Trump? This sounds like yet another problem caused at least in part by Trump antagonism and left for Biden to fix.

"The pandemic is partly to blame. Monthslong USCIS office closures and staff shortages have created a backlog of more than 8 million applications across all types of immigration benefits — including green cards, visas, and protection from deportation — and most work permit applicants have to be photographed and fingerprinted in person. USCIS was also plagued by a budget crisis under the Trump administration, and work permit applications spiked last fiscal year to an all-time high of 2.6 million, straining the agency’s capacity.

Under President Joe Biden, USCIS has taken some measures to combat the problem, though has stopped short of automatically extending the validity period of expired work permits as advocates have requested.... It has also hired new staff, including 200 people in the agency’s asylum division, to address the backlog....

Earlier this month, a federal court vacated two Trump-era rules that had restricted access to work permits for asylum seekers, meaning that their applications could be processed more quickly going forward."

[OnDoutside]

2. Al Franken had Austan Goolsbee on this morning and he had an

interesting view on the labor market vis a vis BBB and childcare plus pre K would potentially free up millions of women to get back into the market. Of course you would always need (and should encourage) immigrantion but it would alleviate pressures in so many areas. As Goolsbee said, it's a no brainer.

[Hortensis]

3. True. Remembering, though, that at all times over half the nation

ranges from not real happy about immigrant labor to extremely opposed. And right now we're in the middle of a RW populist revolt, with even civil war not impossible, with anger over immigrants a top, top issue.

Those FOr opening to doors to immigration, of course, is an interesting goulash of

* folk like me who like the nation of immigrants, legal and otherwise, that've we normally had,
* the many in the U.S. who long for family and friends to join them again,
* economists
* business, of course
* the extremist fringe types who call for completely open borders

AND, perhaps even most passionately for "the establishment" revving immigration right now:

* the anti-immigrant tRumpists and RW powers for their populist rage-energized white nationalist
authoritarian takeover followed by
vicious purging the nation of our many millions of immigrants
* LW populists who see RW insurrection as clearing the way for their takeover,
* Anarchists and others hoping for bloody civil war and total collapse period.

Hey, turns out just about everybody's for increasing imigration right now. Maybe a cautious, most needed approach would be best, though.

[bhikkhu]

4. I'm pretty conflicted about the whole thing

For the first time in my 57 year life, employers have to raise wages and compete against each other for entry level employees. It's almost always been the opposite everywhere, as employers could offer crap wages, treat employees badly and fire them for anything. Now things are lined up a little better toward worker's rights. Still a long ways to go, but I never expected to see things happen the way they have.

I think it would be obvious that ramping up immigration would reverse things back to the norm, where workers have few rights and few expectations, and no real security.

More immigration means more housing needs as well. It's been decades since the US has put any real effort into building affordable housing; it's still illegal in practice to build affordable housing in most areas. In my own town you can't build anything under 1200 sf, even in a manufactured home, and there are standard requirements that all the utilities and features be the newest and most efficient tech. I can see the reasons for some of it, but in practice that simply makes it impossible to build housing for anyone who's not well established in a career.

Also, what happens if all open jobs are filled? You have 11 million new jobs and increased economic activity. One thing that has inexorably tracked economic activity is carbon emissions. Increase one and you increase the other, and we will just race a little faster to the abyss. I don't see any realistic or practical plan to do otherwise. Essentially, our economy is killing the planet, and what's good for the US economy is bad for life in general. That's hard to get past.

Yes, we could accommodate more workers, but they'd have few housing options, they'd drive down wages, and they'd speed up and amplify climate change.

[Jilly_in_VA]

5. A decent part of this article

is talking about immigrants who are already here. How many of you missed that?