What it takes to work in America
Congress is up against a tight deadline to pass a bill that would provide about $50 billion in aid to Ukraine and another $14 billion to Israel, something the Biden administration has been asking for. That’s because lawmakers are set to enter a recess for the rest of the year on Friday — and so far they’ve been unable to agree on a deal.
Republicans want any legislation on Ukraine and Israel aid to also include changes to the immigration system. For example, they want to restrict the asylum process and the Biden administration’s parole program that lets migrants live and work in the U.S. temporarily.
But what does the data say about how the current system operates for those seeking work in America?
Julia Gelatt is associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute. She spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Sabri Ben-Achour: If you want to immigrate to the U.S. in order to work, how easy or how hard is that right now?
Julia Gelatt: There are pathways for some workers like, there is the H-1B visa. There is the visa for farmworkers. But for many types of jobs, there isn’t any employment-based immigration pathway at all. So, for lower-skilled workers who are working in year-round jobs, like in construction — maybe solar panel installation, for example; in hotels that aren’t open just on a seasonal basis but are open year-round — there is no employment-based pathway to the United States for an employer to sponsor a worker for that job. For many of the health care jobs where we really need workers, for nursing assistants and home health care aides and personal care aides, there’s no way for an employer to sponsor an immigrant worker for that job. We essentially have, you know, year-round pathways through our green card system for highly skilled workers and we have temporary visas for seasonal jobs in agriculture and in non-agriculture, but there is no pathway for lower- and middle-skilled year-round jobs. And that leaves out many of the industries and occupations where there are shortages, where there are really tight labor markets and immigrants could be really beneficial.
Ben-Achour: And then for the category of workers — the high-skilled workers that get what we call H1-B visas — are there enough slots?
Gelatt: There are more employers that would like to bring foreign workers than there are slots available, and there are certainly more people who would like to come and work in the United States than there are slots available. Arguably, we would benefit from having more legal-based immigration, both to sustain and grow our labor force as our population ages and to encourage people to come through legal pathways to come and work just like they want to do, but with an employer sponsor through our legal system rather than coming to the border, asking for protection or sneaking across the border and coming and working and earning those higher wages under the table or off the books.
Ben-Achour: What is the burden on an employer who wants to hire an immigrant?
Gelatt: It depends a little bit on the specific pathway. But generally, there’s a multi-step process that employers have to go through. In some cases, they have to prove to the Department of Labor that they’ve tried and failed to find a U.S. worker for the job. Then, they have to apply to the government to sponsor a worker, then the immigrant themselves has to go through an application process. In pathways that have annual numerical limits — which is many of the pathways like the H1-B visa, like employment-based green cards — some people hit up against those caps, and then either there’s a lottery or people wait in a line. Right now, there are about 1.6 million people waiting in line for an employment-based green card. Most of those people are from India, and Indian nationals, in fact, face a wait for an employment-based green card that is now longer than the human lifespan.
We have different parts of our immigration system that don’t line up. So the H1-B visa is numerically limited, but it has a fairly large number of people that can come each year when you consider capped categories and then uncapped categories and people renewing their visas over time. So there are hundreds of thousands of people on an H1-B visa. But then in terms of employment-based green cards for a permanent pathway, there are only 140,000 of those available each year. And within that, only 7% can go to any one country. So there’s a pretty limited number available. There are a lot of Indian and Chinese folks working on H1-B visas; their employers would like them to stay permanently, they would like to stay permanently. But they face this impossibly long wait to actually get their green card for permanent residence.
Ben-Achour: Basically, it’s not easy to get the visa to work here. It’s much harder to get the green card to continue to work here. Which raises the question about the H1-B visa: It’s really hard to switch employers when you are on that visa, which means it’s also hard to have any leverage to ask for a raise or to go to a job that pays better. It seems like the system is set up to keep immigrants in those visas from earning more even as people fear immigration depresses wages, which it generally does not according to research. Is that by design?
Gelatt: I don’t think that that’s really by design. The reason that it’s difficult to change employers on some of these temporary visas is that there is this idea that immigrants compete with U.S. workers, and so there’s a lot of paperwork to be sponsored for a temporary visa. Again, the employer has to show that they looked for a U.S. worker, and they weren’t able to find one and they truly have a need for a foreign worker. But paradoxically, that process of testing the labor market and making sure that the foreign worker is really needed makes it harder for foreign-born workers to move around the U.S. labor force and to improve their wages and working conditions where they can.
Ben-Achour: TSMC, it’s a Taiwanese semiconductor maker, they agreed to build a factory in the U.S. this summer, and the company said it was struggling to find workers who know how to install semiconductor equipment here in the U.S. So they have to delay the project. Farmers say they have trouble getting seasonal workers. Is there any mechanism by which the slots for workers adjust to the need for workers? Like whether we’re in a recession or whether the economy is growing?
Gelatt: In our current system? No. We are stuck with an inflexible system where we rely on Congress to change the caps and categories for immigration. We would argue and many would argue that we need a system that is flexible. We can’t be waiting 30+ years for Congress to find the will to update our laws. We really should have a system where it is flexible and where it can expand and contract depending on labor demand.
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