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 fabrication. 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 2, host Tom Fox and Author Loren Steffy look at the talent we train and turn away. The bottom line is that immigrants don’t only fill American jobs; they disproportionately create them and current policy is systematically routing that capacity to Canada, Germany, and Singapore.
Key Highlights
- The immigrant-entrepreneur story.
- Immigrant inventors raise everyone else’s output. How do you measure that?
- What is actually blocking the US employment of all this talent.
- Where does that talent go instead?
- Does the H-1B visa program undercuts American engineers?
Key Takeaway
“We give them the education and then hand them the exit. The United States has become the world’s best-funded training program for its competitors.”
Listener Challenge
For employers: audit which functions in the company depend on a visa holder, and how substitutable each one is. Most companies are carrying that risk without having priced it.
RESOURCES
Purchase Reconstructing Immigration