As no-brainers go, this is right up there with the question of how many cans make a six-pack. Restaurants and other employers are direly in need of new recruits. Nearly a million potential hires are languishing in emergency housing, eager to land a job and support their families.
It doesn’t take a Yoda to see how the plights of both parties could be majorly eased by bringing Group A together with Group B.
But because those potential hires are immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S., they’ll continue to languish in converted hotels, former military barracks and at least one complex that previously housed victims of serious mental illness. The best-case scenario, at least under the processes and policies currently in force, is that they’re permitted to start job hunting in six months. The process could and likely will take much longer.
Meanwhile, restaurateurs are changing their formats or rethinking where to open their next place because they can’t find enough staff to enact the original plan. Finding sufficient customers is now a secondary issue. Drawing enough job applicants has become the pressing test of success.
That’s why the industry should be hailing a handful of politicians who normally wouldn’t make its Christmas list. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has been too liberal and pro-labor for many operators’ tastes. But she’s been a dogged advocate of turning the new arrivals in her state into the job candidates that restaurants and other Empire State businesses desperately need.
New York had 110,669 immigrants waiting as of November 2022 to have their asylum requests processed, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse of Syracuse University. They can expect to wait an average of 1,393 days—just shy of four years—for a yea or nay on being welcomed into the country. And then they could wait another 150 days for the go-ahead to job seek, which will likely tack another 30 days onto being supported by the state.
Expediting the process is “my top priority,” Hochul said in a statement. “It is the only way to help asylum seekers become self-sustaining, so they can move into permanent housing.”
She trekked to the White House last week to deliver that message face-to-face to senior members of the Biden administration. The confab lasted for two hours, with Hochul coming away with a promise from the feds to help identify the asylum seekers who could work legally as soon as they filed the necessary paperwork.
Earlier, she set up a registration website for immigrants who’ve been cleared to work and a web portal for employers who’d be interested in hiring the documented newcomers.
Hochul started beating the drum for federal action a number of months back, and has kept up the call through pointed letters to President Biden. In her most recent direct note to the fellow Democrat, she set a streamlining of the work-approval process as the most important step the nation can take to deal with its immigration crisis. Some might say it was more of a demand than a request.
Hochul isn’t alone in beseeching the administration for reason. Illinois Gov. Jay Pritzker and new Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson collaborated on a plea to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas that he “parole” asylum seekers and “create a process for streamlined work authorization” so the newcomers could seek work “in industries facing labor shortages.”
The note was sent right after a busload of asylum seekers detained at the Texas-Mexico border were put on a bus by Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott and sent to Illinois, where they were sleeping on the floors of public facilities.
“This would unquestionably contribute ‘significant public benefit’ to our nation’s labor shortages while providing non-citizens, like the thousands of asylum seekers we serve, a faster and more streamlined pathway to self-sufficiency,” the pair of Illinois Democrats wrote.
Unfortunately, immigration reform is the third rail of politics. Elected officials and their appointees are loath to take up the cause because their constituents think anything pro-assimilation would be an open call for other nation’s murderers, rapists, job stealers and drug kingpins.
Sure enough, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Wednesday that it had nabbed 55 immigrants who had been found guilty in their homelands of various crimes, some of them heinous.
Never mind that the bad apples were found and deported, a strong indication the system works. Indeed, the 55 had all been nabbed as well during a previous illegal visit to the U.S.
Nor was there much attention paid to the risk-versus-rewards evaluation. ICE did not reveal whether the 55 were asylum seekers or just immigrants who lacked documentation. Estimates put that number at 13 million to 16 million.
Contrast the United States’ anti-immigrant attitude with the stance Canada has taken. Facing stagnating population growth and a labor shortage akin to the one in the U.S., our neighbor to the north has decided to swing open its doors and welcome new consumers and potential hires. The stated policy of its national government is to encourage immigration, not throttle it.
“Labor shortages will be in front of us for the next nine or 10 years,” the chief lobbyist for Canadian restaurants told me back in February. “Therefore, we are working with government not only on short-term solutions, but mid- and long-term ones, like immigration. Because the demography will not change in nine or 10 years.”
It's not likely to change in the U.S., either. Too bad attitudes couldn’t change instead.