Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill Requires Immigration to Meet the Need for Skilled Workers
One of the signature legislative achievements of the Biden Administration last year was the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill. This law provides for an historic $1 trillion investment to upgrade our ports, restore our bridges and roads, improve public transportation and provide better broadband access. This investment will generate thousands of new jobs.
With more people out of the labor force and low unemployment rates, the American labor market does not currently have an excess capacity of workers to fill these vacant positions.
America needs to revamp its immigration system to allow American companies to recruit workers with the necessary education and experience to meet these new opportunities.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill includes $110 billion spending for roads, bridges, and major projects. The legislation allocates $55 billion toward cleaner drinking water. $42 billion will help improve America’s ports and airports. Congress put $65 billion toward upgrading our power grid and for improving broadband infrastructure (See Source 1).
The spending of a trillion dollars on infrastructure will create hundreds of thousands of jobs. These massive infrastructure projects will require engineers and electricians, carpenters and construction workers, truck drivers and warehouse workers. Many of these projects will employ Americans with good paying union jobs while improving our economy.
However, there is already a desperate shortage of workers in America. Job openings in the United States are already near an all-time high (Source 2). The number of unfilled jobs exceed the number of unemployed people in many fields (Source 3). This gap may become even wider as spending on infrastructure projects ramps up and new workers are needed to perform these tasks.
American companies are already predicting significant wage growth of 3.4% for their employees in 2022 (Source 4 ). But wage increases alone can’t correct a serious imbalance in the supply and demand for high skilled workers. Educating and training workers for jobs in rebuilding our infrastructure takes time. This labor shortage could delay the implementation of these much-needed infrastructure improvements.
Increased immigration and immigration reform could fix this temporary shortage of workers. American companies could recruit educated and experienced foreign workers with the skills needed to fill open positions. Experienced workers on visas could also help train and supervise Americans with less experience, creating a safer work environment. Having the right people with the necessary skills ensures that these vital projects are completed on time and within budget.
There are also an estimated 10 to 12 million undocumented workers already in America who could help fill positions. Immigration reform could provide work authorization and allow these people to emerge from the shadow economy.
According to the immigrant rights group FWD.US, nearly 69 percent of undocumented immigrant workers perform jobs that we have deemed “essential” in fighting COVID-19 (Source 5). Undocumented workers already comprise 23% of all construction laborers in the country (Source 6).
Legislation that provides work authorization and a path to citizenship for these essential workers can help fill the gap between the demand for these workers and the limited supply of Americans willing to perform these duties.
Increased immigration in other industries may also help in implementing this infrastructure bill. Our economy needs truck drivers, port workers, and warehouse laborers to ease supply chain bottlenecks. Allowing immigrants to fill these supply chain positions would improve productivity and decrease inflationary pressures in our economy. A lack of childcare has kept numerous Americans, mostly women, from returning to work after the pandemic closed schools and care centers (Source 7). Immigrants could help fill open positions in child care, allowing more parents to rejoin the workforce (Source 8).
Our current immigration system desperately requires reforms to meet the needs not only of this infrastructure legislation, but also our economy of the future. The basic structure of our current immigration system was designed in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Congress has not been able to pass major immigration legislation in over 20 years. Our outdated immigration laws impose artificial barriers like visa caps, country backlogs, and long processing times, which hurts America’s global competitiveness.
Most countries in the world provide incentives for immigrants with education and experience. In contract, the United States turns away such workers by the tens of thousands. In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, Congress authorized only 85,000 H-1B visas for professionals like architects, engineers, and accountants. The government received 308,613 requests (Source 9) from American companies who had a foreign national professional who met their company’s requirements for a position. This system denied visas to over 200,000 highly educated foreign workers who had jobs waiting in America.
Our outdated immigration laws required U.S. companies to either hire less skilled American workers or leave these positions unfilled. Neither option is good for our economy.
Congress should pass immigration reform that will allow our economy to hire the people needed to fill vacant positions now and those that will be created in the future. Immigration reform will enable our economy to better use the money that Congress invested in infrastructure in the bipartisan infrastructure bill. And it will also improve American productivity to compete globally in the future. Without population growth from immigrants and their children, researchers estimate that the population of working-age people in the United States would decrease by 4 percent or 7 million workers between 2015 and 2035 (Source 10). This lack of workers would lead to an economic decline (Source 11).
About the Author: Karol Brown is the managing attorney for World One Law Group. She graduated from Yale Law School. Read more about her on our contributors page.
Sources
Breakdown of Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, November 5, 2021. rooseveltdc.com/2021/11/05/a-look-inside-infrastructure/
CNBC, “US Companies are expecting to pay an average 3.4% raise to workers in 2022.”
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CNBC, “US Companies are expecting to pay an average 3.4% raise to workers in 2022.”
cnbc.com/2022/01/18/us-companies-are-expecting-to-pay-a-3point4percent-raise-to-workers-in-2022.html (visited 1/30/2022).Orange County Register, “35 years is long enough for immigration reform,” January 17, 2021.
ocregister.com/2021/01/17/35-years-is-long-enough-for-immigration-reform/ (visited 1/30/2022)Center for American Progress 2020 Report, Protecting Undocumented Workers on the Pandemic’s Front Lines, Dec. 2, 2020. americanprogress.org/article/protecting-undocumented-workers-pandemics-front-lines-2/ (visited 1/30/2022).
Los Angeles Times, “A child-care crisis is keeping women out of the workforce for longer”, Oct, 10, 2021.
latimes.com/business/story/2021-10-10/covid-child-care-crisis-women-in-the-workforce. (visited 1/30/2022).Axios, “Immigrants could help fill America's millions of job openings” Nov. 3, 2021.
axios.com/immigration-jobs-employment-pandemic-labor-shortage-2c5af6a4-4c90-451c-9b8a-124ee55ceb7b.html (visited 1/30/2022).USCIS, H1B Registration System.
uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary-workers/h-1b-specialty-occupations-and-fashion-models/h-1b-electronic-registration-process#:~:text=For%20FY%202022%2C%20we%20received,of%20an%20additional%2027%2C717%20registrations (visited 1/30/2022)Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, “Immigration projected to drive growth in U.S. working-age population through at least 2035,” Pew Research Center, March 8, 2017. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/immigration-projected-to-drive-growth-in-u-s-working-age-population-through-at-least-2035/; Charles I. Jones, “The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population” (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020). nber.org/papers/w26651.
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