As recently as February of this year, across the country and across industries at businesses large and small, employers were saying they couldn’t find enough workers to fill all of their open positions. The Trump economy featured an outstanding job market for workers but also included missed opportunities as employers couldn’t staff up to meet demand. And the president recognized this. The Wall Street Journal’s Michelle Hackman reported the hopeful news: “The Trump administration plans to allow 45,000 additional seasonal guest workers to return to the U.S. this summer, the highest number since the president took office, according to three administration officials.”
Hackman added: “The seasonal worker program, known as the H-2B visa program, enables U.S. employers to hire as many as 66,000 foreign workers a year, with the allotments split evenly between the winter and summer seasons. Congress permits the Department of Homeland Security each year to raise that cap by as many as 64,000 additional visas. In Mr. Trump’s first two years in office, DHS raised the cap by 15,000 visas to 81,000, and last year it raised the cap by 30,000 to 96,000. The additional visas will primarily be available to workers who have previously qualified for H-2B visas because the administration has more confidence that they will leave the country once their job assignments end.”16
There’s little argument against admitting people who have already proven they can be productive workers and good guests of the United States.
Also, America can always use productive citizens. There may be a separate opportunity to admit people who can become more than guests. Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey reported last winter in the Washington Post: “Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told a crowd at a private gathering in England on Wednesday night that the Trump administration ‘needs more immigrants’ for the U.S. economy to continue growing, according to an audio recording of his remarks obtained by the Washington Post.
“ ‘We are desperate—desperate—for more people,’ Mulvaney said. ‘We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.’
“The Trump administration wants those immigrants to come in a ‘legal fashion,’ Mulvaney said, according to the recording.”17
The administration had recently won a Supreme Court case allowing the government to tighten rules to ensure that immigrants do not require public assistance. The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says: “Self-sufficiency has long been a basic principle of U.S. immigration law. Since the 1800s, Congress has put into statute that individuals are inadmissible to the United States if they are unable to care for themselves without becoming public charges. Since 1996, federal laws have stated that aliens generally must be self-sufficient.”18
Fair enough. But for those who are ready and eager to work, why not let them make America even greater?
Trump has essentially already fulfilled his signature 2016 campaign promise thanks to the colorful tariff threat, which he described to us in our interview, that resulted in Mexico’s deployment of additional troops to stem illegal migration. In 2019, Donald Luskin of Trend Macrolytics commented on the news: “Mexico just agreed to expend its resources to stem the flow of migrants from Central America through Mexico into the United States. In essence, Trump just delivered on the biggest, craziest campaign promise in history. He just used tariffs to get Mexico to agree to pay for the wall.”19
And at least according to Trump his recent agreement with Mexico is leading to even more cooperation in the region. The Wall Street Journal’s Louise Radnofsky reported: “President Trump praised Mexico’s efforts to intercept Central American asylum seekers and said that Guatemala was getting ready to sign an agreement that would make it a final refuge for people fleeing poverty and violence in the region.”20
Trump can now focus on helping the United States enjoy the benefits of legal migration. Long term, as long as the United States maintains pro-growth policies, the worker shortage is going to get worse. In November 2019 the government’s National Center for Health Statistics released its final report on 2018 births in the United States: “The general fertility rate… for the United States in 2018 was 59.1 births per 1,000 females aged 15–44, down 2% from 2017 (60.3) and a record low rate for the nation.… This is the fourth year that the rate has declined.…”21
Fortunately there’s a world of talent eager to come here. Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi received asylum in the United States as a child in 1978 after his family fled revolutionary Iran. According to a 2018 profile by Sheelah Kolhatkar in the New Yorker: “Khosrowshahi’s family led a prosperous upper-class life in Tehran until the Iranian Revolution threw the country into chaos. A wealthy uncle lived in New York, and the Khosrowshahis, after escaping temporarily to the South of France, where the family had vacationed in the past, immigrated to the United States and moved into a three-bedroom condominium in Tarrytown. Shortly after they arrived in the U.S., fifty-two American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, a crisis that lasted more than a year and created a surge of anti-Iranian sentiment in America. The family watched from across an ocean as their manufacturing business, which produced consumer and pharmaceutical goods under brands licensed from Western countries, was nationalized by the new Islamic government.”22
Ever since, people who have been waiting for the Iranian government to reform have been constantly disappointed. And as Ms. Kolhatkar noted, after the young Dara Khosrowshahi found refuge in the United States, the regime in Tehran wasn’t done messing with his family: “When he was in his early teens, his father returned to Iran to take care of his own father, who was ill. He was arrested by the government and detained for six years. Khosrowshahi’s mother, left to care for three teenage boys, took a job as a salesperson at a high-end women’s-clothing boutique in Manhattan—the sort
