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Wednesday Immigration Bulletin: Immigrants, Would Get The Job Done

Added 2022-11-02 18:32:04 +0000 UTC

Happy Wednesday! Jobs report highlights immigrant labor needs; Define American’s new report on immigration news coverage in North Carolina; and some housekeeping items.

Immigrants, Would Get The Jobs Done

The Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report this week shows 10.7 million vacancies. Bloomberg's Senate sage Steve Dennis tweeted yesterday that under different political circumstances, this would be an ideal economic moment to talk about immigration reform.

The American economy was built from the start on immigrants filling labor shortages, but these are not ideal times for immigrants in the United States. For decades, politicians from both parties have long decried the "broken immigration system" on the campaign trail, only to keep the same broken system very much in place when elected.

In Congress, immigration is a multidimensional partisan stalemate where lawmakers rarely come together on the topic except in one area: enforcement funding - which increases every year through the bicameral appropriations process with strong bipartisan support.

Canada is taking the opposite immigration policy approach to their “labour” shortage. A million job openings north of the border prompted Immigration Minister Sean Frasier to announce the goal of bringing 500,000 migrants to Canada by 2025.

CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) reports that immigrants accounted for four-fifths of Canada's workforce growth from 2016 to 2021. "Every job that is not filled represents one less person contributing to Canada's economic growth and one less person paying taxes to support Canada's social infrastructure," said the Business Council of Canada president and CEO Goldy Hyder in a media statement.

American business groups large and small have a long history of urging Congress to loosen restrictions on immigrant labor. In 2012, Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg touted progressive immigration reforms together at a New England Council luncheon. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has supported several comprehensive immigration reform pushes in Congress that have ultimately died ingloriously on the Hill.

Brookings published some great research earlier this month showing how immigrants are complementary to native born workers. The team of Dany Bahar, Carlos Daboin Contreras, and Greg Wright even created a “Complementary index” to study relationships between different occupations. Their blog about the work is worth a read, if you haven’t already….

New Report on Immigration News Coverage

An important new study by Define American takes a look at immigration news coverage in North Carolina. The toplines on the report align neatly with some unpublished research I did for Latino Rebels about a year ago about immigration coverage in top stateside dailies like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Politico, and so on.

For Friday’s bulletin, I’m going to go back through my work from last December in the context of the new report. Meanwhile, check out Define American’s work here and send me your thoughts on the state of immigration news coverage in the United States.

Housekeeping Items (3)

Beginning Monday, Pablo Reports will start publishing daily, Monday through Friday. This will help keep the bulletins shorter, punchier, and more digestible than some of the sprawling bulletins I've been posting on just Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
I registered in the District of Columbia as an LLC! It feels nice to be a business owner. Thanks to all who’ve been shepherding me on this journey. I wouldn’t be here without you.
Subscribers: Don’t forget to join the Telegram chat if you haven’t already. Email or DM me for the link. It’s a lively immigration group chat where I post bulletin previews.