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With nearly 27 million people thrust onto the jobless roles over the past six weeks, the pool for potential hires will be broad and deep for companies ramping back up in May after the pandemic-spawned shutdowns across America.
That, however, won’t be the case for companies reliant on high-skilled immigration labor.
The restrictions President Trump imposed on immigration on April 22 are going to make it tougher for select employers to acquire the skill sets they need in their work forces, a prominent immigration attorney in Kansas City says—and the jobs they need to fill aren’t likely to go to Americans, in any case.
“Businesses can’t deal with uncertainty,” said Mira Mdivani, “and it’s already difficult to compete for international talent. This only increases that uncertainty.”
The Johnson County lawyer says that among the sectors hardest-hit by the new restrictions will be health care, geotechnical engineering and information technology. But the impact will also be felt in places where the jobs may be high-profile, even if the numbers of them aren’t, as with major-league baseball players.
“The premise for this is that employers are using internationals to take American jobs,” Mdivani said. “But if you look at Cerner—I’m on their site right now—they have critical medical infrastructure job openings. They have 485 jobs that require exactly the kinds of skills that employers are having struggles filling–data scientists, solution architects, system engineers. If enough Americans were available to fill those, that would be great. But they aren’t. It’s an incredible hurdle this administration has put in front of them, and it’s just not based in facts.”
The reality, she says, is that’s far cheaper to hire a U.S. worker than to run the regulatory maze required to bring a green-card holder onto the payroll.
“We need to be aware that when someone loses job at a closed restaurant, it doesn’t mean that worker who is valuable for that job can simply take the job of a surgeon, a major-league pitcher or a software engineer,” she said. “Part of getting our economy back and going is high tech, and that will require employees that U.S. employers need.”
As hiring policies go, she says, this one is “completely misguided, demoralizing and sending the wrong signal.”
Trump has given the departments of labor and homeland security until late May to come up with new guidelines for addressing immigrant labor. Until then, Mdivani hopes, there may be opportunities for business to make its case against restrictions that go too far.
“These,” she said, “put the U.S. in a very bad spot as far as completion for global talent.”