U.S. needs immigrants

The anecdotal evidence is all around us. Who hasn’t seen a “Help Wanted” sign in the local coffee shop? Your favorite restaurant? Or maybe just hoped the empty desk down the hall would find an occupant.

And this week the Labor Department made it official — job

openings jumped 8 percent to 6.2 million, the highest on record dating back to 2000. Now what’s not to like about jobs just waiting to be filled?

But there is also a growing body of evidence that hiring has fallen, that employers are struggling to find workers to fill those jobs. The Labor survey found the biggest increase in job openings in construction and manufacturing. But there were also increases in job openings in financial services and health care.

The data from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey — even more than the 4.3 percent unemployment rate — points to an economy that is at or near “full employment.”

Now surely this should be greeted as a triumph by a president who insisted he wanted to “make America great again.” However, it was the very same Donald Trump who also insisted on shutting the borders and pulling up the drawbridges — most recently even on legal immigrants, supporting a bill that would cut in half the number of legal immigrants.

The latest numbers are the best indicator yet that the U.S. economy has an enormous capacity to absorb workers and can’t grow without them.

Another report released this week — this one by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School found the Trump-supported RAISE Act would result in 4.6 million jobs by 2040 and that the U.S. economy would be 2 percent smaller than under current immigration totals.

“If you have fewer workers, we will have less economic growth,” said Kimberly Burham, a managing director at the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Real immigration reform must be predicated on meeting the nation’s needs, not stifling them.