December 2022
Everyone understands the plight of these migrants - escaping from countries dealing with the same crises we are - poverty, health, mental illness, homelessness, climate, crime, corrupt governments, gangs, cartels, and more - but there are no solutions that won't take time, energy, money, and create additional crises. Americans can barely take care of themselves financially, physically and emotionally yet alone migrants from warm weather countries.
We are not prepared to take on thousands of people especially in the winter with climate, power outages, covid, flu, RSV, and more. Sick migrants with no manner of getting health care will cause greater suffering to thousands of Americans. We've seen this in Europe and it rarely ends well.
More migrants dropped off outside vice president's home in freezing weather on Christmas Eve
Biden announces new migration programs as he prepares to visit the border on Sunday CNN - January 6, 2023
Everything changed due to Covid-19. The American labor force more and more consists of people who want to work from home - often running their own businesses.
Migrant workers are known to take jobs that Americans no longer want. Asylum seekers are legally able to work in the United States while they await their asylum cases. During that waiting period, those seeking asylum can apply for work permits - a process that usually takes 180 days before they are authorized.
In March 2020, President Trump invoked Title 42 - a law enacted during the pandemic to prevent the spread of Covid - that has kept migrants and would-be asylum seekers out of the country.
The processing of legal immigrant worker visas picked up towards the end of 2021 when there were close to 2 million fewer working-age immigrants in the United States than there would have been if pre-pandemic immigration continued unchanged.
The decrease in legal immigration since then has hurt American businesses especially industries that require lower skilled labor: construction, agriculture, and hospitality. Those industries had higher rates of unfilled jobs last year - adding to existing labor shortages. There are currently 10.3 million open jobs in the US - 377,000 in construction and 1.6 million in hospitality (hotels, restaurants). That number has been on the rise in recent months.
The lack of available workers has pushed wages higher fueling inflation. In addition to an aging workforce there is a lack of foreign labor contributing to labor shortages. The combination of a plunge in net immigration and a surge in deaths during the pandemic probably accounts for about one-and-a-half million missing workers.
College educated and skilled workers often find it difficult to find jobs in the United States as they compete with Americans for the same jobs. There are those that I have read and have decided that they were returning to their home country where they could work as professionals and not laborers.
The days where the world looked to the United States as the ideal place to live is waning for many reasons - political, economic, social, psychological, and geophysical.
Just as there is no perfect place to live in the United States there really is no ideal place to be in the world where climate change is making planet Earth unsustainable. Everything is on borrowed time.