According to the Census Bureau, the working age population (ages 16 to 64) in the United States peaked in 2019 and has been decreasing since then. In fact, the working age population is 2.5 million below the expectations.

The researchers estimated that the slowdown of immigration due to Trump policies and COVID-19 resulted in 3 million individuals not immigrating to the United States since 2019. This decrease in immigration in the last 2 years has impacted the labor force as most of these missing immigrants would have been of working age. Furthermore, reports of the Pew Research Center show that yearly the U.S. has about 1 million new immigrants, and roughly three-quarters of them end up participating in the labor force. In 2020, due to the United States bans and pandemic restrictions, that number dropped to about 263,000.

The executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, Stuart Anderson, told Yahoo Finance that several potential immigrants are deciding to immigrate to other locations such as Canada instead of coming to the United States. Indeed, he has suggested several ways to Congress to fix the immigration shortfall: “Measures in the reconciliation bill would help recover legal immigration numbers by allowing the use of unused family and employment based green cards from previous years and permitting immigrants mired in long-term backlogs to pay a fee to gain permanent residence sooner.”

From Garvish Immigration Law Group, LLC we hope that the United States decides to implement an immigration system that would allow more qualified immigrants to immigrate legally and support the United States economy as soon as possible. In fact, allocating unused green cards as well as proposing a reform that would allow the United States to decrease the labor force shortfall may be the right solution that Washington needs to consider in order to recover the United States economy.

Sources

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