Help Wanted: Immigrants fueling U.S. workforce

Welcome back. As baby boomers continue to age out of the workforce and industries like healthcare and food service face major labor shortages, 1 segment of the population is stepping in for the work. Kate Rogers joins me now with that story, Kate. Hey there Dom. Immigrant workers are helping to fill much needed roles at elder care facility Good when living in Northern Virginia. The nonprofit foundation has a citizenship program that helps foreign born workers attain citizenship. With financial aid, tutoring, and mentorship, the program has helped 185 immigrants work toward becoming U.S. citizens. Including Wilner Villner, he was able to bring his daughter here from Haiti through Goodwin’s worker program and is now hoping to have his wife join and attain citizenship as well. It’s a good opportunity when I when I come here, when I when I was working here, my friend told me if you walk in here for a couple of months, the goodwill even going to help you to pay your citizen 40% of Goodwin’s 1200 employees are foreign born, filling gaps in the labor market and caring for aging Americans where workers can be hard to find. We need more hands to provide care. About 70% of 65 year olds are expected to need long term care in the future and so we need a lot of hands to support those needs right now. One of the best ways that we see to find that is through people coming from other countries our our global talent, and there’s a huge competition for them beyond elder care. These workers are filling key roles from tech to agriculture as boomers continue to leave the workforce. So these folks are not taking jobs. They are helping to bolster and helping us build back their adding needed workers to the labor force. Now that’s a key point. Dom is prime working age individuals that you saw at the beginning, their age 25 to 54, are still participating in the labor force at levels higher than they were during the pandemic. So these workers are additive. They’re not necessarily taking away jobs from Americans who want to work. They’re filling roles that can be hard to find workers to fill. Kate, how much of A boost for the economy has this group of immigrants given the overall economy? Yeah. So the Congressional Budget Office has projected that the labor force will be higher by more than 5 million workers in the next decade. And much of that, Dom, due to immigration, that’s expected to grow GDP over the next decade by $7 trillion more than it would have been otherwise, $1 trillion more toward revenue. So these are big economic boosts here and economists on Wall Street, even the Federal Reserve here, all talking about what a boost this has been to the US economy over the last few years. All right. Kate Rogers with the store on immigration right now. Thank you very much.