Is President Trump living on another planet? According to the Census Bureau’s report on December 2, America’s workforce is aging, especially in some firms. In addition, the nation’s fertility rate is declining and is below replacement levels. An average of 2.1 children per woman is necessary to keep a nation’s population stable. America’s rate is 1.6 to 1.7. While that is not bad compared to other advanced countries, our population is still going down. That means that we need people to maintain productivity and keep our economy intact or advancing.
As more of our population ages and retires from white collar and blue-collar jobs, we need workers to take their places. Some jobs will be eliminated by artificial intelligence, but there are many types of jobs that need to be performed by humans. We need people at both the high end for technology and health care positions (mainly H1B visas) and for more menial kinds of work like in agriculture. Who is going to pick our fruits, harvest our crops, and work in our meat-packing plants. Who is going to do landscaping for us? These are jobs performed mainly by immigrants, legal and illegal. And caregivers for the increasing numbers of cognitively or physically impaired elderly are also needed, work done by immigrants as well as native-born people.
Many of our tech jobs are handled by educated foreign-born immigrants on H1B visas, as the U.S. does not have enough trained people to handle all these positions. A number of people attending our colleges and universities are also people who wind up on H1B visas, who also pay the full amount of tuition, helping to support these institutions. They then go into tech fields or health care. We lack enough primary care physicians and hospital physicians to fill all the open spots. H1B immigrants can help provide medical care in areas that are under served, particularly in rural regions of our country. And we are also in dire need of trained nurses.
However, Trump wants to charge $100,000 for each H1B visa which would dissuade most students and job applicants from coming here. That would be disastrous for health care in many areas, some tech companies, and educational institutions that need the funding from foreign students. Also, many research jobs in universities are handled by foreign students on H1B visas.
America can’t be blind to the fact that our population is aging, and our fertility rate is declining. If we are to maintain a strong, productive economy, we need immigrants to fill the positions that are and will be opening up. We must make it easier for immigrants with training in the fields losing workers to obtain visas legally to work and perhaps remain in the U.S. And the costs for H1B visas should be made more reasonable as they were previously, so we can attract the educated workforce that is necessary.
www.robertlevinebooks.com
Political junkie, Vietnam vet, neurologist- three books on aging and dementia. Book on health care reform in 2009- Shock Therapy for the American Health Care System. Book on the need for a centrist third party- Resurrecting Democracy- A Citizen’s Call for a Centrist Third Party published in 2011. Aging Wisely, published in August 2014 by Rowman and Littlefield. Latest book- The Uninformed Voter published May 2020