The Hill (Op-ed)
By Mara Swan
October 30, 2017
President Donald Trump and Former President Barack Obama agree on at least one thing: It is Congress’ responsibility to enshrine the protections once extended by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy into law. In a 2012 speech implementing the measure, Obama said, “Precisely because this is temporary, Congress needs to act.” Five years later, Trump ensured the policy was temporary and in his distinctive style tweeted, “Congress, get ready to do your job – DACA!”
Nearly 800,000 young people who qualify for DACA by being brought to the United States by parents and guardians without documentation now rely on Congressional action. That clearly raises an issue of compassion necessitating a humanitarian response to address the needs of these individuals, many of whom serve as valued employees of our nation’s largest companies. But it also raises the need for a broader assessment of the value of foreign-born workers not only to those companies, but to the economy, our society and, yes, to American-born workers as well.
While much of the business community agrees on the need for a statutory authorization of the DACA program, we also believe that the time is right to start talking about the economic facts regarding immigration, which our companies experience first-hand.
That is why I am joining with more than 100 of my colleagues, the most senior human resource executives of the largest companies doing business in the U.S., on a letter urging Washington policymakers to take these facts into account in future deliberations on immigration.
Immigration issues affect all of us. As Labor Secretary Alex Acosta recently noted, there are six million unfilled job openings in the U.S. A shortage this size is crippling to American employers. To work toward solving this problem, U.S. employers spend more than $630 billion annually toward training and equipping the American workforce, largely focusing on vitally important fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Yet, as was detailed in the HR Policy Association’s recent Workplace 2020 report, “Many companies continue to experience difficulty finding sufficient workers to fill both lesser-skilled positions and high-skilled ones.”
The worker shortage will not be fixed overnight. The economic, educational, and social forces that cause such vacancies are immense and, in the short term, intractable.
As a stopgap solution, many companies employ foreign-born workers to help fill these workforce gaps. These foreign-born workers, both low and high skilled, play a vital role in ensuring that our local and national economies remain robust.
Foreign-born workers increase wages and create new jobs in meeting workforce needs. According to a recent study of a visa program for high-skilled workers, “a 1 percentage point increase in the foreign STEM share of a city’s total employment increased the wage growth of native college-educated labor by about 7–8 percentage points and the wage growth of non-college-educated natives by 3–4 percentage points,” while having “insignificant effects on the employment of those two groups.” On the national scale, foreign-born workers increase U.S. GDP; conversely, curtailing immigration would make GDP growth more difficult.
Another study by Harvard Business School discovered that holders of a high-skilled foreign-worker visa are responsible for significant increases in patents filed in the U.S. with “weak crowding-in effects or no effects at all for native patenting,” concluding that “total invention increases with higher admissions levels primarily through the direct contribution of immigrant inventors.” As my colleagues can attest, foreign-born workers are innovative, create new products, and find ways to increase productivity.
What happens when government policy reduces our ability to hire foreign-born workers? We know the answer, as earlier this year scarcity of a temporary work visa caused a severe workforce shortage that hurt American small businesses and local economies. During the crisis, employers who relied on the visa for seasonal workers were vocal about its importance, with one saying, “I’m always going to hire American first. I’m always going to hire someone locally first. We’re not using this program because it’s easy. It’s not. It’s very difficult and expensive, but we’re using it because we have no other options.”
America’s foreign competitors understand these facts, and are eager to welcome the workers the U.S. does not admit. Some have gone so far as to say that the United States’ attitude toward foreign workers has created opportunities for them to compete against American businesses. Foreign governments are facilitating the inclusion of foreign-born workers as the United States places higher scrutiny on its foreign worker programs.
These facts must be considered in any immigration policy that truly helps Americans. It is time for Congress to act. It is time for Congress to assure Dreamers that we want them here. But it is also time for Congress to develop broader immigration policy that increases innovation, alleviates the ongoing workforce crisis, and empowers American workers to succeed for their families and our economy.
Mara E. Swan is executive vice president, Global Strategy and Talent, ManpowerGroup and chair of HR Policy Association’s Emerging Workplace Committee.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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