Mediaboss Marketing

Leah Hogsten | The Salt Lake Tribune Sen. Orrin Hatch discusses his insights on the Immigration Innovation Act of 2013 he introduced to bring reforms to the nation's immigration laws for high-skilled workers and an agriculture guest worker program at Zions Bank Building Founders Room, Wednesday, May 1,2013.

By Bernardo Castro | Special to The Tribune

| May 19, 2022, 12:00 p.m.

With the passing of former U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Congress can best honor his legacy of compassionate policy-making by finishing what he started.

In 2001, when I was only 10 years old, Hatch reached across the aisle and joined forces with Democratic colleagues to introduce the first proposal in Congress to give undocumented immigrant minors, often called Dreamers, a legal future in America. Six years prior, my parents had boarded a plane with my siblings and me in hand, and a small box of items to flee dire circumstances in Mexico.

Hatchs legislation was meant to create hope and opportunity for children like me. It would have established a means to earn permanent legal status in the U.S. by completing a two- to four-year degree or serving in the U.S. military before applying.

Twenty-one years later, thanks to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, I have found the hope and opportunity that Hatchs bill outlined but not the permanence. I am proud of my business degree from Brigham Young University, of the small business I co-own with my wife and the life were building in the heart of Utah.

But Congresss failure to pass the original DREAM Act, or any of the many bipartisan iterations of it since, leaves me at risk of being separated from all that I know and being deported to a country in which I have few connections and no memories.

Because DACA was created by administrative action, it remains at risk, leaving recipients like me in a constant state of uncertainty. Recent signaling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals indicates that I and the more than 600,000 current DACA recipients may lose this last thread of protection any day unless Congress finally acts.

To some, it might seem odd that I hold Hatch as a beacon for others to follow amid such a toxic political climate.

In his later years, Hatch cast votes that some construed as anti-immigrant because of his advocacy for bolstering border security funding. But I think Hatch understood that immigration reform demands both parties at the table to make progress on a holistic approach.

In 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported more than 1.7 million encounters with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. This significant increase includes Title 42 expulsions and Title 8 apprehensions. It accounts for single adults, family units and unaccompanied minors, and it paints a picture of a system that is failing and overwhelmed.

Its clear there is a crisis that needs to be addressed with a humane solution.

During the same year, Dreamers contributed $32.9 million in Utah state taxes and held $305.5 million in purchasing power. More than three-quarters of DACA recipients fill roles deemed essential by the Department of Homeland Security, from medical professionals to farmers and ranchers. Our local economy will be faced with a perilous challenge without Dreamers like me in it.

The tendency of both parties is to pick one side of the issue and villainize the other. Under this de facto mode of operation in D.C., everyone loses. And it fails to reflect what most Americans really want: progress.

A recent poll by the National Immigration Forum found that 8 in 10 voters want solutions this year that strengthen the border, create a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and ensure a legal and reliable workforce for Americas farmers and ranchers. These focuses are in line with reforms promoted by the Alliance for a New Immigration Consensus, a group of nearly 40 organizations across the faith, business, agriculture, education, national security and advocacy communities.

Sen. Hatch understood these simple tenets:

The border needs securing.

Dreamers need security.

Our workforce needs stability.

To honor Sen. Orrin Hatch, his tenure and his legacy, its time for Congress to get to work.

Bernardo Castro grew up in Hyrum, graduated from high school in Sandy, served an LDS mission in St. George and is the co-founder of Shop Taby, a size-inclusive womens clothing brand, located in Provo.

See more here:
Utah Sen. Orring Hatch used to be a leader in defending Dreamers brought to the US as children. - Salt Lake Tribune

There are three numbers Id like you to keep track of as you read this column: 11.3 million, 6 million, and 1.6 million.

The 11.3 million is the number of job openings in this county. The 6 million is the number of unemployed in the United States, and the 1.6 million represents the number of attempted illegal border crossings.

Why did I bring this up?

Simple: reforming and loosening our immigration rules can help address our inflation issues.

Abdul, what are you talking about? You have officially lost your mind. Now granted, most geniuses arent appreciated while alive but hear me out on this one.

Part of the reason for inflation is a worker shortage and employers having to pay more; remember those 11.3 million job openings and 6 million unemployed? For example, a few years ago (i.e., pre-pandemic), a McDonalds employee, on a good day, made $8 an hour; fast forward post-pandemic, that employee now starts anywhere from $13 to $15 an hour. Thats a $5 an hour increase. I have to admit that is not bad for someone who has to end a sentence with would you like fries with that?

Now imagine many restaurants and retail outlets from across the country having to go from $10 to $15 an hour for what is fundamentally low-skilled labor; you can see how this can lead to price increases. And yes, I know about the theories regarding supply chains, gas prices, and too many government dollars chasing too few items. Still, for now, were just talking about the workforce.

So weve got 11.3 million job openings and 6 million people out of work. Now thats where the 1.3 million attempted illegal border crossings come in. Ladies and gentlemen, I maintain that if we want to get inflation under control and other issues, we need to address our worker shortage plain and straightforward. Immigration reform is the quickest way to do it.

We have a lot of job openings and many people who want to come here and have a better life. The math is pretty simple but having the political will to do such things is a different story altogether.

And those job openings are both high-skill and low-skill. For our high-skill wage jobs, we need to make it easier for those visa applicants to come in and get work. For our low-skill wage jobs, I believe we can figure out a solution to get people into those positions. It may take a little more effort, but I think it can be done.

Fundamentally though, despite the arguments that the government is paying people not to work, which is no longer the case (at least at the federal level), our longer-term issue is that the American workforce is getting smaller. We need to replace those retiring workers. And I think easing our immigration rules is one way to accomplish that.

Now, this is where the moaning and gnashing of teeth about securing the border kicks in. However, no one can explain to me what that means or, for that matter, what a secure border looks like. However, suppose we want to address our worker shortage which is one of the causes of inflation because employers have to pay more. In that case, we need to address our immigration and make it easier for people to come here and get the jobs the rest of us are not going to do. And yes, we need to reduce government subsidies to encourage folks on the dole to get off.

We are making critical coverage of the coronavirus available for free. Please consider subscribing so we can continue to bring you the latest news and information on this developing story.

Abdul-Hakim Shabazz is the editor and publisher of Indy Politics. He is also a licensed attorney in both Indiana and Illinois.

Follow this link:
Immigration and inflation | Opinion | reporter.net - Lebanon Reporter

A recent presentation at the University of Saint Thomas in Houston highlighted how challenges associated with the outdated US immigration system have cultivated an inefficient, unethical, and unsafe shadow economy that threatens the sustainability of the construction industry. Stan Marek, CEO of MAREK, and Loren Steffy, award-winning author and business journalist, discussed how workforce shortages, the lack of a pathway for unauthorized immigrants to earn legal status, and the lack of enforcement against worker misclassification and payroll fraud have made it easier for unscrupulous employers in the construction industry to profit at the expense of law-abiding taxpayers, workers, and businesses. They called on lawmakers to pass a bipartisan ID and Tax policy as a solution.

In the construction industry where workforce shortages are rampant and competition for bids is fierce, Marek explained that one way that many companies cut costs is by classifying their workers as independent contractors instead of employees. Many businesses also pay workers off the books in cash. This allows those employers to avoid paying payroll taxes and providing benefits like health insurance and workers' compensation. Doing this not only allows those employers to undercut and underbid companies that are following the rules, it also cheats taxpayers, and leads to a degradation of the trades due to a lack of emphasis on training and the treatment of workers as disposable.

Marek stressed the importance of the employer-to-employee relationship and the safety and skills training that comes along with it and explained how doing things the right way can actually end up saving costs in the long run and even help to alleviate rising housing costs.

When you have a system where everybody is an independent contractor and you dont have an employee to employer relationship, they dont get the training that employees do. Our company prides itself on safety. Job sites are dangerous. Safety is number one, and then skills training. Somebody that is trained to do a specific function does it better. A big problem we have in construction is doing it twice. So many people, when theyre not trained, make a mistake and it has to be redone. Its estimated 20-25% of projects have to be redone because people dont have the skills training, said Marek.

I have watched the degradation of trades, especially in residential housing that has all independent contractors. Nobody has an employer-employee relationship, and it's amazing they can build the amazing houses that they do, but if they were trained and had constant skills they could lower the cost of housing. Housing has gotten more expensive because workers are not trained. Unfortunately, thats whats now happening on the commercial side as well, people getting away from the employer-employee relationship, he added.

Marek also emphasized the fiscal shortcomings of this situation where employment and income taxes are not being paid and uninsured independent contractors end up in emergency rooms leaving taxpayers to foot their bills.

If you're not an employee and you're a self-employed independent contractor, youre supposed to pay self-employment taxes, but most of those people dont and the government doesnt do anything about it. The IRS is totally ineffective when it comes to collecting money from these people Its also a public charge because the taxpayer has to take care of the healthcare costs for independent contractors that arent provided employer healthcare insurance for what can be a dangerous job, said Marek.

The Speakers also explained how this troublesome situation is compounded by the lack of legal immigration status for many construction workers. With rampant workforce shortages, a lack of legal pathways for immigrants to come and work in the construction industry, and no existing method for unauthorized immigrants to obtain legal status, it is estimated that around half of construction workers in Texas are unauthorized immigrants.

Since 1986 theres been no way for millions of people to get legal status, so theyre working off the books, said Marek. Weve had to lay off a lot of outstanding workers because we found out through ICE or insurance audits that the ID they had was not their own. When ICE comes in and tells you these people are not authorized to work in the US, the first thing you think is oh well theyre going to deport them. They dont do that. Those workers just no longer work for me. They go to work for someone else as an independent contractor where they get paid less and dont receive proper training, he added, explaining why many unauthorized immigrants end up working as independent subcontractors or off the books due to their lack of employment authorization.

The speakers called on lawmakers to pass targeted bipartisan legislation including an ID and Tax policy that will help to discourage this type of worker misclassification while increasing the legal tax-paying workforce. This makes economic sense at a time when open jobs in the US are at an all-time high and workforce shortages are contributing to rampant inflation

Immigration reform is a political footballwere never going to solve the whole thing, the term comprehensive immigration reform, its too big, too complicated and too divisiveWe have a solution. Its an adult DACA that we call ID and Tax. Weve got 11 million undocumented people here, many of them have been here for over 30 years. Were not going to deport them, workforce shortages are killing our economy, and most of them, including construction workers, were labeled essential workers during the pandemic, said Marek.

Why cant we ID them for national security, do a background check, and then let employers hire them and pay taxes on them? Its commonsense, he added, noting that in the interest of legislative success the policy does not include a path to citizenship.

Creating a method for unauthorized immigrants to earn legal status and work permits would allow them to work for tax-paying employers and generate significant fiscal revenues without raising taxes on law-abiding businesses and taxpayers. This would also help combat inflation by helping to reduce federal deficits. Combining such a policy with legislation to increase enforcement against worker misclassification and payroll fraud would increase its effectiveness in this regard.

Right now, we all need workers. I need one hundred workers and I can't hire them. And there are so many undocumented workers out there that have been working with 20 years of skills but we cant hire themFor every 1 million people that we can take out of the underground economy and put on a W2 payroll working as an employee, thats 4.75 billion a year into social security. Multiply that by 10 and thats a significant amount of money, said Marek of the fiscal benefit of ID and Tax.

Steffy also pointed out that in addition to fiscal and workforce improvement related benefits of ID and Tax, it would also have economic ripple effects by allowing unauthorized immigrants to participate more fully in the economy.

Its not just about hiring them and paying taxes, its the societal change that comes about with this. If you have someone that has a job with an employer who can vouch for them and say yes were issuing them a paycheck every two weeks, they can open a bank account, they can get a car loan, and they can get a home loan. Theres an economic ripple effect here that affects all of us whether we realize it or not. We have allowed these 11 million people to live here for many years, but not to fully participate in our economy. ID and Tax is a way to bring these people out of the shadows so we can get the full economic benefit of these immigrants, said Steffy.

The speakers also placed emphasis on the need for a legislative solution for DACA, a program that has allowed unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children to earn legal status and work permits. Although the 10-year-old program has wide public support and has helped enable DACA recipients to increase their contributions to society, it has faced legal challenges based on the fact that it was created through executive order, and faces a real risk of being terminated by federal courts.

For us, the most important thing right now is the Dreamers. DACA has been floating around out there for almost ten years, and all those kids, Ive got a bunch of them working for me, theyre great young men and women. 740,000 who signed up and have given all their information to the government, and theyre scared to death theyre going to be deported, and thats not right. But at least theyre working and contributing. There are another 2 million undocumented kids who have grown up here and gone to our schools, and when they graduate high school they cant get a job as an employee, said Marek, pointing out the irony of the current immigration system that does not allow unauthorized immigrant children whose educations we have already invested in to go on and work in legitimate tax-paying jobs.

To learn more about these issues, check out Deconstructed: An Insider's View of Illegal Immigration and the Building Trades, a book co-authored by Steffy and Marek.

Also check out the free Rational Middle Video Docuseries that examines more issues and challenges associated with the US immigration system. Click here to view the episode about ID and Tax.

Read more from the original source:
ID and Tax Solution for Construction Worker Misclassification and Immigration Challenges - Construction Citizen

Talk to people in the leisure and hospitality industry, and theyll tell you the shrinking population of young people is not the only reason for the on-going worker shortages. An abrupt decrease in immigration is another.

People in the leisure and hospitality industry should know. In no other industry is the worker shortage as acute.

The leisure and hospitality industry is a massive collection of industries. It consists of two subsectors, one being arts, entertainment and recreation; the other, accommodation and food service. Arts, entertainment and recreation includes performing arts, spectator sports, museums, zoos, fitness centers and golf courses. Accommodation and food service includes hotels, restaurants, bars and a plethora of the like.

Prior to the pandemic, leisure and hospitality ranked third among the nations leading private sector employers (behind professional and business services, and education and health services). It employed 17 million people, 10.7 percent of employed U.S. workers. Accommodation and food services employed 14.5 million; arts, entertainment and recreation, 2.5 million.

In Glynn, leisure and hospitality is a monster industry, far and away the countys leading employer. Just before the pandemic, leisure and hospitality employed about 8,500 Glynn workers, 22 percent of the countys employed workers. Accommodation and food services employed about 7,350; arts, entertainment and recreation employed about 1,150.

The pandemic hit leisure and hospitality harder than any other industry. Nationally, the industrys recovery from the pandemic has been impressive, but not complete. U.S. leisure and hospitality employment currently stands at 15.5 million, 1.5 million below its pre-pandemic level.

In Glynn, leisure and hospitalitys recovery has been impressive and probably complete. The most recent industry employment figure for Glynn is 8,243 for the third quarter of 2021. But tourism here has been roaring for months. A current employment figure below 8,500 would be surprising.

Lurking beneath those numbers is a detail that explains why the worker shortage in leisure and hospitality is so acute. Leisure and hospitality relies heavily on two sets of workers: young workers and immigrants.

The median age of a worker in the U.S. is 42.2 years. The median age of a leisure and hospitality worker in the U.S. is 31.7 years. In the U.S., 12 percent of employed workers are age 16 to 24 years. In leisure and hospitality, 35 percent of employed workers are age 16 to 24 years.

The problem? Between 2010 and 2019, the population of 16 to 24 years olds in the U.S. shrunk by 843,029. The population under age 16 shrunk by 876,772.

In the U.S., 17 percent of employed workers are immigrants. In leisure and hospitality, the figure is 20 percent. In accommodation, its 32 percent.

The problem? Between 2000 and 2017, the U.S. foreign-born population increased by an average of 743,000 per year. Between 2017 and 2019, the average increase fell to 203,000 per year. With the pandemic, the U.S. foreign-born population appears to have decreased (though official figures for 2020 and 2021 are not yet available).

To the point, the abrupt shift in immigration in 2018 and 2019 from the 2000-2017 trend cost the U.S. about 1.1 million workers, half of whom would have been college educated.

Would an additional 1.1 million workers solve our current worker shortage problem? No. But it would take a nice chunk out of it.

The new trend in immigration is old news to people in the leisure and hospitality industry, especially hoteliers. The industry has been lobbying hard for immigration reform since 2018.

Hows that for a predicament? The population of young workers cant be unshrunk. And immigration reform requires serious people in politics.

Look for leisure and hospitality to become the leading employer of robotics engineers.

Go here to read the rest:
Another reason workers are hard to find | Editorial Columns | thebrunswicknews.com - Brunswick News

The ideas that immigrants are a drain on resources or present an environmental risk to the United States are not limited to explicit eco-fascists though. Both of those narratives are common on Fox News, including from the networks top star Tucker Carlson. On April 25, after Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) blamed migrants for causing environmental degradation at the southern border, Carlson thanked him for mentioning the effect on the physical landscape, on the land. The host added, Where is the Sierra Club, you know, as our country is being trampled?

Carlson has discussed this theme repeatedly over the years. The Potomac River has gotten dirtier and dirtier and dirtier and dirtier, he said in a 2019 interview in The Atlantic. I go down there and that litter is left almost exclusively by immigrants. (The Potomac Conservancy condemned Carlsons remarks, calling them racist plain and simple.)

I actually hate litter which is one of the reasons I'm so against illegal immigration. It produces a huge amount of litter, he said in August 2018.

That December, Carlson said that immigrants make our own country poorer, and dirtier, and more divided. He faced a significant backlash following those remarks, including from 26 companies which pulled advertisements from his show. But he doubled down on the comments just days later in a monologue that explicitly called increased immigration levels not just the act of migrating a threat to U.S. natural resources.

Thanks to illegal immigration, huge swaths of the region are covered with garbage and waste that degrade the soil and kill wildlife, he said. Illegal immigration comes at a huge cost to our environment.

The left used to care about the environment the land, the water, the animals, he continued. They understood that America is beautiful because it is open and uncrowded. Not so long ago, environmentalists opposed mass immigration. They knew what the costs were.

Far-right website The Federalist wrote up that segment under the headline: Tucker Carlson Is Absolutely Right: Illegal Immigration Is Destroying The Environment.

One year earlier, far-right pundit Ann Coulter wrote an opinion piece for the Daily Caller titled Choose Between A Green America And A Brown America, criticizing the Sierra Club for adopting progressive immigration policies. In the piece, she made a racist reference to a Mexican cultural trait of littering and promoted taking white Western European immigrants over Mass Third World immigration.

The eco-fascistic right often couches its anti-immigrant conservationism in Malthusian anxieties about overpopulation. A sensible environmentalism would have to ask is it good for us or the environment that the population grows artificially through the mass introduction of foreigners? Christopher Roach wrote in a piece for American Greatness, a hotbed of far-right Trumpist nationalism. Roach also referenced an immigration regime that transports billions from the fertilethough impoverishedThird World, highlighting again the overlap between great replacement panic and eco-fascist narratives.

The far rights demonization of immigrants as dirty or bad stewards of the environment goes hand-in-hand with the lie that they steal wealth from the United States, or otherwise dont contribute their fair share.

Our national wealth is up for grabs by whomever gets here first, and they are coming, Carlson said on May 21, 2019. The United States is being plundered.

That segment was based on a report from an immigration restrictionist group that has deep ties to the far-right ecology movement, called the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The group seeks to drastically reduce the level of authorized immigration and stop all unauthorized border crossing, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has designated FAIR as an extremist group.

In a recent blog post, FAIR government relations manager Preston Huennekens argued that any increase in our population is going to our tax natural resources and that migration had negative environmental impacts through the physical act of migrating itself, including border trash, smuggling trails destroying fauna, etc.

The idea of scarcity is crucial to the racist appeal of eco-fascism, and Fox News regularly suggests that municipal and federal resources cant accommodate increased migration.

At a time when there were more than half a million Americans homeless living on the streets a crushing number that our leaders ignore but that rises every single year at that moment, Joe Biden is giving hotel rooms to illegal aliens, Carlson declared. It's hard to believe that's real. Oh, but it is real.

Anchor Harris Faulkner played that clip on her March 23, 2021, show, to which Fox News Will Cain responded: Welcoming in migrants from Central America, that's all fine and good but not if its coming at the expense of a limited amount of resources that we're depriving of Americans. As Media Matters noted at the time, immigrants contribute more to governmental resources than they use.

Read this article:
Eco-fascism is on the rise and its anti-immigrant beliefs have a bullhorn on Fox News - Media Matters for America