This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, October 18th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

There is a massive rift in the labor market and immigrants could help fill those gaps to keep products and services

moving through our economy. Sadly, the Trump administration imposed substantial

hurdles to migration to the United States and Joe Biden hasn't done much to change it.

Cato's David Beer details the executive action that could allow more workers into the U.S.

Many employers are having a difficult time hiring.

Unions have sensed an opportunity in terms of employers who are still employed to try to organize those workers to form unions. And on the other side of this we have a massive amount of

potential labor that is being told you can't come to the United States at all. Is that about right?

That's right. I mean we have two different ways of looking at this. There's the population of

immigrants and foreign workers and refugees who the economy would normally expect to be there, who are not because of restrictions on immigration imposed by the Trump administration and

continued by the Biden administration. We looked at this and it's about a 1.2 million

person deficit in the number of work eligible foreigners who have been

kept out as a result of the pandemic restrictions.

So that's a very substantial part of the 10 million job openings in the economy that we've had over this summer.

But we also have, in addition to that,

we have 9 million people who are waiting for a green card through family sponsorship or

employer sponsorship, those people are also a potential source of

labor and you know both of these backlogs and and weights are really

reaching unprecedented and historic scale and you know there's not any effort bipartisan or even

partisan to address the needs of employers to get these workers from

outside the country.

...