By David Larson

Many conservatives have been calling for a reduction in the number of H1B visas the United States grants every year. They highlight places like Morrisville, North Carolina, where foreign tech workers have quickly transformed the community. It’s easy to downplay concerns of this kind as bigotry, but when a settled population suddenly feels they are not able to recognize their community, history shows cultural tensions often follow.

In addition to pushback against white-collar jobs going to foreign workers, there is the continuing complaint that many blue-collar jobs in the United States are now done by immigrants who have illegally crossed the southern border. Concerns here are valid too, especially since keeping the border largely unguarded has left the nation at risk from drug and sex trafficking, terrorism and gang activity.

But there is at least one major counterpoint to keep in mind when calling to reduce the pool of foreign labor (whether high-tech H1B holders or illegal immigrants doing manual labor): Businesses in North Carolina, and across the nation, are still in dire need of workers.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, at the end of 2024, released research declaring, “America is facing a worker shortage crisis: There are too many open jobs without people to fill them.”

North Carolina finds itself among the “more severe” states, with only 55 potential applicants for every 100 jobs, or, more precisely, 173,531 unemployed workers for 316,000 job openings.

In a normal economy, a 5-percent unemployment rate is considered “full employment.” This is an optimal number of workers to have looking for a new job in order to fill a normal amount of openings.

But in North Carolina, we’ve had under this optimal 5 percent since July of 2021 (3.7 percent right now). That’s right; our unemployment rate has been too low for almost four years. This is great for anyone who might want a job, since (in most fields) there will be plenty of places immediately willing to hire them. It’s not great for businesses, though, who may not be able to find anyone to hire. It also means that when they do find someone, it may be a candidate who would not have been a top contender in a more competitive job market.

A cultural problem?

As stated at the outset, it can certainly cause cultural tensions when large numbers of people from very different cultures appear in a once-small town. It’s true the United States has been uniquely successful at assimilating widely different cultures in major urban centers — like New York City, San Francisco and Chicago — in past generations. This time may be different, though.

We now have the highest levels of foreign-born residents in the nation’s history. After high levels of immigration from the mid-1800s through World War I, levels dropped steeply. By 1970, only 4.7 percent of Americans were foreign born. But since that time, the percentages have spiked to 15.6 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and 26 percent of the nation’s children have a foreign-born parent.

Even to those, like myself, who believe in America’s ability to take in large numbers of those who wish to embrace our way of life, this seems like pushing the limits.

But if we want to maintain a strong local and national economy that is not constantly in need of foreign workers, developing certain values will be necessary: namely, strong families and a strong work ethic.

The first is necessary because without people getting married and having children, the birthrate (which is at historic lows) will only continue to plummet. If our culture does not encourage forming families with children, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that there aren’t as many young people ready to fill all of these empty positions.

Of course, people having more children in the 1980s and ’90s is not an implementable solution to today’s worker shortage. But making a family-friendly culture now can prevent the problem from repeating, or getting worse, as time goes on.

The other value mentioned, maintaining a culture of work, is just as important. According to Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), “The percentage of able-bodied men between the ages of 18-65 working or actively looking for work went from more than 87 percent in the 1950s to only 68 percent as of January 2023.” Why are about one-in-three working-age men not working?

There are a lot of theories, many have to do with chronic illness (including drug addiction and mental illness), but I can’t help thinking a large part of this is the lack of a culture of personal responsibility and hard work. The chart for women looks the opposite, with only 32 percent working outside the home in 1950, gradually increasing now to 57 percent. But more than a quarter of women with children choose to stay home, so this doesn’t seem like as much of a negative trend as the men’s numbers.

It’s clear that many of these men feel let down by the system. They may have lost a job to automation, outsourcing or a lower-cost foreign workers. Finding ways to encourage these men to reclaim their place in the economy would certainly help ameliorate some of the labor shortage.

America remains a land of many opportunities. This is especially true in the current environment created by our extremely low unemployment rate, where countless businesses are desperate to find any warm body willing to show up and work hard.

Even if we began to revitalize American values around family and work ethic today, though, we’d still be left with a dire shortage of workers. With that in mind, the Trump administration is likely to take more pragmatic steps to target chaos at the border and unfairness in visa programs without greatly diminishing the pool of foreign workers.