Kashkari is the president of the local (Minneapolis) Fed Reserve. Post-pandemic, in this area, we’ve been seeing historically low unemployment rates - now they’re saying 3.5 jobs available for every unemployed person (!) But the total workforce is still down from prepandemic levels.

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"So what happened?" [Kashkari] asked. "Where did the workers go?"

He offered several explanations, including the pandemic spurring more people to retire than expected, workers who died from COVID-19 as well as those who continue to struggle with long COVID, and enduring constraints of caring for children or family members.

Then he added one more to the list: lost immigration.

"Immigration has been a vital source of workers in our economy, both lowskilled workers and highskilled workers to meet our businesses' needs and our economy's needs," Kashkari said. "That has really dried up in the pandemic. And we've got to address that if we really want our economy to be competitive going forward."

…Neel Kashkari… told attendees that the number one issue he hears from small and large businesses as he travels the region is the difficulty in finding workers.

Businesses need immigrants. Farmers need immigrants. We all need immigrants.

If only there were young foreign folks willing to work hard - indeed, willing to do almost anything - to come to our country.

That’s what happens when you get rid of the people who make life work for you.

And a new wage scale normal.

You often hear “Americans won’t clean toilets”, but if you make toilet cleaning an attractive enough position, people would be coming out of retirement to clean toilets. Remember when most jobs came with health care and a retirement plan?

Supply is not meeting demand, capitalism has a built in answer. The price goes up!

Foreign workers are a damper on wage growth.

You’ll hear “We can’t find trained workers”. Then train them! Or actually support a robust educational system.

I would still argue that the U.S. should try to limit its overall population growth. We were in the 200s (millions) when many of us were small, and now we are going towards three times that level.

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btfc
... Or actually support a robust educational system.

Too often business support for education has been for training to their immediate needs, not a general education that keeps people learning and adapting to a changing job environment. So often I have seen where businesses have used that to end their own job training, then complain they can't find people who can use or operate ______.

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Ca Bob
I would still argue that the U.S. should try to limit its overall population growth. We were in the 200s (millions) when many of us were small, and now we are going towards three times that level.

My wife and I did our bit by having just one offspring (son). My son and daughter-in-law decided that they would have just one offspring (grandson). Family celebrations are not anything like when I grew up with five brothers and a sister and part of me feels it's unfortunate that my son and grandson won't have that experience, but those are the kinds of sacrifices I think we need to make for the sake of future generations and their planet.

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e pluribus unum

Some pundit said the only people still reporting to work at Twitter are the H1-B visa holders. They are essentially wage slaves if they don't want to go back to their home country.

Something needs to be done about job listings. Several years ago, I got an invitation to interview 18 months after I sent a resume. I had been working a better paying job for 3 months. It has gotten even worse since then. There are so many fake job postings that some people are applying for 200 jobs before they get an interview. It needs to cost real money to post a job opening, and it needs to be re-posted (more money) after two weeks.

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In tha 360. MRF User Map

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Ca Bob
I would still argue that the U.S. should try to limit its overall population growth. We were in the 200s (millions) when many of us were small, and now we are going towards three times that level.

Many of us believe the opposite: grow the population. That number will put us more in line with the other two rising superpowers, China and India.

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Hurts like a bastid...

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btfc

You’ll hear “We can’t find trained workers”. Then train them! Or actually support a robust educational system.

Are you some kinda commie or what?

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Ted King
My wife and I did our bit by having just one offspring (son).

My wife and I have two sons but my siblings (both married) don't have any siblings. How does that rank?

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Ca Bob
I would still argue that the U.S. should try to limit its overall population growth. We were in the 200s (millions) when many of us were small, and now we are going towards three times that level.

No, not three times; certainly not in the foreseeable future. We’re around 332 million now; had a 0.1% growth rate in 2021 (!); and much of that appears to be immigration, with US women having (on average) 1.64 births (ie not anywhere near enough to be population-neutral (something over 2).

Wikipedia

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pdq

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Ca Bob
I would still argue that the U.S. should try to limit its overall population growth. We were in the 200s (millions) when many of us were small, and now we are going towards three times that level.

No, not three times; certainly not in the foreseeable future. We’re around 332 million now; had a 0.1% growth rate in 2021 (!); and much of that appears to be immigration, with US women having (on average) 1.64 births (ie not anywhere near enough to be population-neutral (something over 2).

Wikipedia

2021 is a bit of an aberration, two things contributed to the low growth rate that year. One was reduced immigration, the other was the loss of hundreds of thousands from COVID. The rate for the decade before that was around 5-6 times as large.

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Ca Bob
I would still argue that the U.S. should try to limit its overall population growth. We were in the 200s (millions) when many of us were small, and now we are going towards three times that level.

FYI: We're at 0.1% population growth and poised to turn and enter negative territory roughly at or before we hit 332 million.

The expectation is that we will have negative population growth in 2022.

We don't have a lot of babies in this country. We stopped replacing "lost" population by birth around 2011.

The last bastions of population growth were life-expectancy and immigration. Both have fallen off a cliff. There's the shortening life-expectancy we've had since the early 2010s and the "excess deaths" related to the pandemic. And immigration is setting records for how LOW it is. The Biden administration has continued 45's policies eliminating most LEGAL immigration paths.

So, don't worry about a population explosion. It ain't happening.

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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/18/2022 07:55PM by Tiangou.

Seems the overall US population has opted for quality over quantity.

Japan, here we come.

We need to throw open our borders.

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Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where the weather is wonderful even when it isn't.

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RgrF
Seems the overall US population has opted for quality over quantity.

Immigrants bring innovation, higher quality education and wealth.

Historically, immigrants have been responsible for something like 50% of all new small businesses and billion-dollar startups. They don't just fill jobs, they make jobs and keep the economy going.

Immigrants have been responsible for the majority of patents in the last century and drive scientific innovation.

In the last decade we've seen a decline in large businesses in the United States as employers open doors in countries that offer more skilled and educated workers and those countries inevitably are friendly towards immigrants.

We're drowning the country in stupidity income-inequality and cultural stagnation by eliminating immigration.

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