Businesses and governments statewide had more than 80,000 job openings and only 32 people looking for work for every 100 of those openings, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Unfortunately, according to the same dataset, Nebraska and Utah currently have the lowest available worker ratio to job openings in the U.S. Only 56 Nebraskans are looking for work for every 100 job openings, while the national average is 84 people looking for work for every 100 openings.
Okay. So Nebraska has a severe labor shortage.
Nebraska has decided immigrants are the solution to this problem, and they are correct.
"They need to be LEGAL immigrants!", you shout.
As I have been pointing out for as long as I've been a member of this forum, our quota system is severely out of kilter. Our quota system does not provide enough supply of immigrant labor to meet the demand.
For decades now, sane politicians in both parties have attempted to pass immigration reform legislation, but a minority of racist assholes have always tanked any such efforts.
So if you are a farmer, and you need 100 laborers and the government only allows you 50 immigrant workers, and no Americans are beating down your door, you have no choice but to hire illegal immigrants to bring in the crops.
Farmer after farmer after farmer have been saying this for a very long time.
Now, I have been making the supply and demand argument for over a decade.
Lookee here. Nebraska is now saying the exact same thing:
According to a recent study funded by the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce Foundation, “There is universal and widespread business support for immigration reform as a means to address the workforce gap in Nebraska. Participants clearly understood that the demand generated from the state’s current economic growth trajectory will exceed the state’s projected workforce supply. Nebraska’s decreasing birth rate coupled with a high labor force participation rate will require a talent influx in order to meet the needs of the state’s strong projected economic growth. There was universal consensus that immigration is critical to the state’s ability to continue to grow and prosper.”
It is far past time to stop allowing the racists to be dominating the conversation. Everyone needs to start kicking our cowardly representatives in the balls until they pass immigration reform.
