The United States must solve its illegal immigration problems before it can address an intensifying shortage of workers with more immigrants, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said Tuesday.
Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who oversees border issues as chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security committee, told an audience at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis that he knows the economic health of the U.S. is threatened without more people coming in.
But at a conference focused on the role of immigration in the Midwestern and U.S. economies, Johnson spent much of his keynote address focused on illegal immigration. "Until we fix [illegal immigration], we're not going to be able to get to the economic thing we have to fix," Johnson said. "I'm just pointing out the political reality."
Johnson, who was a chief executive of a metals manufacturing firm before being elected in 2010, acknowledged the country is facing a shortage of workers and said he has seen it in his own company and heard about it from executives in Wisconsin and elsewhere. "We don't have enough workers in manufacturing. We don't have enough workers in the trades," Johnson said.
He noted one reason for that is more parents are steering teenagers to college rather than factory work. But he also said the legal immigration system, which could be used to increase the U.S. workforce, is too heavily used for rounding out families of existing immigrants.
"We don't have a functioning legal immigration system that is tied toward work requirements," Johnson said, adding that about two-thirds of immigrants who gain legal entry to the country every year do so for family reasons rather than to fill an in-demand job.
Economists for years have warned that declining birthrates have posed a threat to the nation's long-term economic growth. In recent decades, the U.S. has increasingly relied on immigration to drive population growth.
"This is about the long-term growth rate of the country," Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said at Tuesday's conference. "If you just do the math, it's very hard to deliver 3 percent economic growth over the long term if we don't have stronger population growth than we're experiencing right now. The country is still getting educated about that math."