Immigration is argued in America as a question of borders, crime, and culture. It is actually a question of labor supply and the people who feel that most directly are the ones trying to staff a job site, a hospital floor, a kitchen, or a fab. This series makes the economic case, one argument per episode, in the language business owners already use: head count, cost base, compliance risk, competitive position. It does not relitigate the politics. It reframes the problem as a workforce problem and ends with what an employer can actually do about it. The theme of the entire series is: America has spent forty years treating its largest economic asset as a liability, and the bill is now coming due in wages, prices, and growth.
In this Episode 1, host Tom Fox and Author Loren Steffy look the Math Problem; the country has more open jobs than it has people to fill them, and no domestic pipeline that closes the gap in time.
KEY HIGHLIGHTS
- You open the book with a number rather than an argument. What is it?
- Why talk semiconductors and health care?
- Employers hear ‘labor shortage’ and think ‘pay more.’ Why doesn’t that solve the problem?
- Is there any version of this where demographics bail us out?
- Why can’t we just hire more Americans?
SOUNDBITE
“We are trying to build a twenty-first-century economy on a twentieth-century workforce blueprint, and the blueprint hasn’t been updated since 1990.”
CLOSE
For listeners: count your own visa-dependent and hard-to-fill roles and ask how long each has been open. That number is the show’s subject.
RESOURCES
Purchase Reconstructing Immigration