This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 8th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When it comes to the current labor crunch, how much blame can we lay at the feet of the

Trump administration's restrictionist

immigration policy.

Caters David Beer says Joe Biden is well within his authority to alleviate many of

those problems and is done next to nothing to fix it. I mean if you look at the number of

job openings in the economy right now we're over 11 million job openings and that's basically double what the average number of job

openings since the Bureau of Labor Statistics first started counting that stat in about the year 2000 and so of that

doubling about a 20% to 25% could be attributed just to the COVID

slowdown in visa issuances to workers abroad, immigrant workers abroad.

And so that's a very substantial part of the problem when it comes to the labor shortage that we're seeing.

When you read what elected members of Congress are saying or other elected

representatives are saying where do that where are they laying the blame?

Well it's really all over the map and it depends on who you ask, but I would say that probably the largest part of the

equation for members of Congress is you know employers not wanting to pay people enough

and you know I think that's you know that's a real problem, a real obstacle when you're trying to explain to them, you know, the limits of just continuously increasing wages.

I mean, you can increase wages,

but if costs are going up everywhere,

you just get inflation.

And so there's not really a benefit there to workers and you end up with less production.

And when you have less production, you know, goods and services become more scarce and that drives inflation.

...