Death, Taxes, and Global Mobility

The classic Benjamin Franklin idiom says nothing is certain except death and taxes, and tax season is always a sobering reminder of how right he was. Yet while Americans cope with the sticker shock of the arms and legs they pay each year, the U.S. national debt inexplicably increases by about $1 trillion every hundred days.??

With so much money at its disposal, you would think our government could get a grip on the southern border. We can storm the beaches of Normandy and put a man on the Moon but are apparently paralyzed when it comes to stopping the over 8 million illegal crossings that have occurred just since President Biden took office. And those are the ones we know about. To my border hawk friends, don’t call it a comeback – it has been a crisis for years, even under the watch of hardliners like President Trump.?

Perhaps we should add immigration to Ben’s list of certainties. People have left their homes in search of a new and better life since the very onset of civilization, from early humans’ diffusion from the Fertile Crescent to the Mayflower pilgrims. Migratory patterns are just a human reality – amplified, in our case, by America’s unrivaled promises of political liberty and economic opportunity.?

It's no wonder so many Mexican, Caribbean, and Central American nationals undertake the unimaginable risks – of death, imprisonment, or other human tragedies – to come to the United States. We can debate endlessly about whether the real motive is humanitarian or economic in nature. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, and the truth is likely a little of both.???

It’s a trope at this point to blame hyper-polarization or partisan vitriol, but it sure does seem like immigration is a particularly stubborn nut to crack. Cynics and realists say that immigration reform will never happen during an election cycle, and in the 24-hour cable news world, it’s always an election cycle.?And so, we're doomed to eternal partisan gridlock, with no solution in sight. They aren't wrong. Immigration is so personal to so many people, it’s tough to even discuss in a public forum without igniting someone’s passions one way or another.

Employment-based immigration is particularly misunderstood, with both the far left and far right finding strange bedfellows in the "they took our jobs" narrative. Too often, we fall into the trap of debating border security and migrant detention centers in the same breath as skilled and professional visas for AI data scientists and industrial engineers.

Meanwhile, it's relatively obvious that younger Americans entering the workforce aren't exactly keen on labor-intensive jobs, skilled trades, or STEM fields. The result is a talent shortfall that serves not to protect American jobs, but harm American competitiveness. Like it or not, we're going to need a bigger bench if we expect to go head-to-head with China. We can't run a modern industrial economy entirely on Liberal Arts degrees and wishful thinking. And so, businesses will continue turning to foreign sources of talent who can actually get the work done.

But despite the Biden Administration's acknowledgment of the issue, the U.S. immigration system (even for nonimmigrant guestworker visas) is plagued with regulatory limitations, quotas, visa caps, and endless red tape. Many businesses are ineligible to participate, while others find themselves bogged down by regulatory hurdles, delays, and high transaction costs. Desperate and discouraged employers often decide that the juice isn't worth the squeeze, choosing instead to hire workers under the table. Or worse -- just send the jobs overseas.

And there's the rub -- global mobility is inevitable, and we likely couldn't stop it all if we tried. But in our efforts to stop some of it, we've somehow ended up with the worst of both worlds: a bureaucracy so Byzantine that it actually encourages illegal immigration and off-shoring while stonewalling the workforce we need to keep the economic engine running.

Perhaps it would help if we stopped viewing “immigration” as some monolithic, singular topic. Immigration is a big tent that covers many interrelated topics with their own discrete challenges and potential solutions. You cannot solve the U.S.-Mexico border crisis the same way you solve green card backlogs for Taiwanese software developers or issues faced by couples on 90 Day Fiancé.??A focused debate is a productive debate, and one that can create a wall of separation between policy and emotions.

Tom Bortnyk is Sr. Vice President and General Counsel at másLabor, the nation’s leading provider of comprehensive H-2A and H-2B services. The company represents thousands of H-2A and H-2B employers, in all fifty states and across nearly every industry. For more information, visit maslabor.com.