Amid Major U.S. Labor Market Needs, the Biden Administration Could Facilitate the Migration of Needed Workers through Existing Channels

WASHINGTON — With the United States recording more than 10 million job openings each month since mid-2021 and the unemployment rate hitting a 54-year low in January, the U.S. economy is hungry for more workers. Yet longstanding bureaucratic inefficiencies in the legal immigration system and case backlogs that worsened dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic are preventing individuals eligible for immigration to the United States from filling some of the vacancies. They also are hampering conditions for temporary workers already in the country, some of whom are struggling to renew their status and work authorization.

Though legislative action is ultimately the solution to better align a legal immigration system that was last updated in 1990 with present and future U.S. economic imperatives, Congress has failed repeatedly over the past two decades to take up substantive reform and appears highly unlikely to do so in the near term. Yet there are a range of actions beyond those already advanced that the executive branch could take under current law to facilitate the migration of needed workers, retain immigrants already in the U.S. workforce and ease challenges experienced by U.S. employers and their foreign-born workers.

A Migration Policy Institute (MPI) policy brief out today details 21 measures that the executive branch could adopt to improve the functioning of the legal immigration system for the benefit of the U.S. economy, employers and immigrant workers alike.

Among the proposals discussed in Unblocking the U.S. Immigration System Executive Actions to Facilitate the Migration of Needed Workers:

• Improving the efficiency of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in adjudicating immigration applications through expanded online filing, elimination of duplicative processes and shortened forms.
• Helping workers maintain their employment authorization amid application processing delays, expanding visa renewal options and extending job search periods for temporary workers.
• Facilitating greater use of available uncapped temporary worker visas including for Central and North American workers, granting work authorization to more spouses of temporary workers and ensuring annual caps for green cards are reached when demand is strong.
• Improving consular processing so that the State Department can more efficiently issue visas to qualified applicants.

While immigration policy is just one of the tools that can address huge labor market demands, overcoming backlogs and addressing longer-standing inefficiencies in U.S. immigration processes can help employers recruit foreign workers with needed skills, support continued economic growth and allow the U.S. to continue to attract the world’s most-talented workers amid rising competition from other countries.

“While governments around the world are taking steps to revamp their immigration laws to match new labor market realities, in the United States, Congress’s attention to immigration is likely to be diverted, at least in the near term, to oversight and record encounters at the U.S. southwest border,” writes MPI Senior Policy Analyst Julia Gelatt. “Yet even without Congress, there are some steps that the executive branch can take.”

The Biden administration already has acted over its first two years to streamline processing and make other changes to the immigration system. MPI has tracked 416 immigration-related executive actions taken by the administration as of today—putting it on pace to exceed the 472 executive actions taken during the Trump administration, which was widely perceived as the most active yet on immigration.

The Unblocking the U.S. Immigration System policy brief is the first in a series of policy analyses and blueprints that will be generated under MPI’s new Global Skills and Talent Initiative, which is exploring the role that immigration can play in addressing current and future workforce needs in rapidly evolving labor markets. The initiative will focus, in particular, on employment-based immigration and the supports that can help immigrants apply their full range of educational and professional skills to labor markets that are being rapidly reshaped by economic shifts, demographic pressures, technological advances and shocks such as the pandemic. MPI will formally launch the initiative in March with a high-level public convening.

Read the policy brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/us-executive-actions-migration-workers.

For an appraisal of the Biden administration’s track record on immigration during its first two years, check out: www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-two-years-immigration-record.