Both Canada and the U.S. are short of workers. One nation has a plan.
Both Canada and the U.S. are short of workers. One nation has a plan.
The Looming Labor Shortage
In Canada, there will be one retiree for every two workers in as little as ten years.
In November, Canada’s government set a new goal of accepting 1.45 million immigrants which expected in 2025, 60 percent trained in health care and other urgently needed job skills. This was done to deal with the looming labor shortage.
Similar immigration legislation has stalled in the U.S, because Republicans are blocking Democratic efforts to bring in skilled workers until more is done to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.Even though the U.S. has almost 10 times as many people as Canada, it brought in the same number (about 275,000) of legal, employment-based immigrants in fiscal year 2022 as Canada plans to bring in each year for the next three years, according to data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the people who made Canada’s new policy.
Bills to increase the numbers of workers
In the last session of the U.S. Congress, which ended in December, bills to increase the number of foreign-born entrepreneurs, high-skilled workers, microchip manufacturers, and farm workers did not get enough votes to become law.
The only one that got out of the House of Representatives was the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. Thirty Republicans and one Democrat voted against it.
It has still not been brought up for a vote in the Senate.
At the same time, both the Liberals, who are in power under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and the Conservatives, who are in the opposition, say they support immigration.
Trudeau’s new immigration goal is to make it easier for refugees and low-skilled workers to come to Canada. He also wants to bring in more highly educated workers in fields like health care and technology. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, was chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship at the time. At that time, she introduced two bills to increase employment-based visas, but neither passed the House.
The Legal Immigration System
Lofgren directly compared the policies of the U.S. and its neighbor to the north as she pushed for change.
During a hearing that she named “Oh Canada!
How out-of-date U.S. immigration policies send the best people to other countries,” Lofgren said. “The last major change to our legal immigration system happened in 1990.
“Meanwhile, other countries, like Canada, have made great strides in building flexibility and recruitment incentives into their systems to attract highly skilled immigrants, including those we can’t accept. Rep. Thomas McClintock of California, who was the ranking Republican on the committee at the time, said what many Republican opponents have said about such plans: that even legal immigration routes should not be changed until the Biden administration does more to stop illegal immigration at the southern border.
McClintock said, “The left’s constant message is that we need to encourage even more mass migration, despite these jaw-dropping (border) numbers and the effects on American families when the labor market is flooded with low-wage illegal immigrants.”
Canada Needs More People
Canada’s Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said that the need for more workers is so clear that the issue isn’t nearly as divisive, and nativist arguments like “Canadian jobs belong to Canadians” just don’t have much weight.
“We did this because we think that Canada needs more people.
For economic reasons, we need them.
We need them because of how people live.
Fraser said, “It will help make our communities livelier and more interesting places to live.”
Yet many jobs remain unfilled.
Brenda Perkins-Meingast, the senior director of nursing strategy at University Health Network in Toronto, said that her network of hospitals needs 400 to 500 more nurses.Perkins-Meingast said, “We are in a healthcare crisis and there is a big shortage of nurses, so we really needed to get creative and think outside the box.”
This year, University Health Network started a program to help more nurses with degrees from outside of Canada get the training they need in Canada.
Rebecca Shi, who leads the pro-immigration group American Immigration Business Coalition, says that both the high end and low end of the U.S. labor market are likely to suffer in the coming years if employers can’t hire more foreign workers.
Shi said that if there aren’t more people working in agriculture, food prices will keep going up and hurt American families.Shi said, “If they keep playing politics, there will be consequences at some point.”
“The truth is that we might have to start importing milk soon, which would make prices go up and could make food insecurity a problem.”
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says it is “committed to fairly and efficiently administering the legal immigration system”. The agency says it will continue to uphold America’s promise as a nation of welcome and possibility by treating everyone with fairness, integrity, and respect.
Source: NBCNews.com
SUMMARY:
In November, Canada’s government set a new goal of accepting 1.45 million immigrants which expected in 2025. This was done to deal with the looming labor shortage. Similar immigration legislation has stalled in the U.S., because Republicans are blocking Democratic efforts to bring in skilled workers. Canada’s immigration minister says the country needs more workers. The U.S. labor market will suffer if employers can’t hire more foreign workers, a pro-immigration group says.
