Newly tightened immigration rules hurting state

It was not the sort of problem that should tie up a top official at a hotel and restaurant holding company, yet it happened at the start of last summer.

The company — with multiple businesses in New England — wanted to bring back a veteran, seasonal hotel worker from Jamaica in a high-priced resort area.

The man wasn’t a manager, nor someone with special tech skills, nor a high-level employee of any kind. But the company needed him — and couldn’t bring him in under newly tightened immigration visa work rules.

Suddenly in 2017, the government needed to know what would happen if the company didn’t get the worker.

“We had to sign on a Department of Labor agreement that it would severely impact the financials of the corporation,” said the official, who requested that I not name the company for fear of retribution by the federal immigration service and the Trump administration.

Naturally, the corporation couldn’t make that claim. The job went unfilled for the summer.

It affected the economy in a small way that’s adding up. Tighter rules for companies hiring foreign workers, and tighter immigration restrictions generally — both of which we’re seeing under President Donald Trump — could hurt Connecticut more than most places, experts said Friday at a conference on the state’s economy.

We all know Connecticut isn’t creating jobs, as the total in Connecticut was down in November compared with one year earlier, according to preliminary estimates.

But why is that? Skittishness by employers in a high-cost, low-growth state, certainly. But that’s not the whole answer, as executives everywhere say they have jobs open and can’t find the right people. “We have probably over 25,000 jobs that are unfilled,” said Peter Gioia, economist at the Connecticut Business & Industry Association, which sponsored Friday’s event in Hartford.

That includes 13,000 jobs in manufacturing, he said.

And that brings us back to foreign workers and immigrants. Connecticut, famously, is gaining just a few thousand people a year through its birth rate. And equally famously, we’re losing an average of just over 20,000 people a year who move to other states.

The only thing keeping the state’s workforce afloat is immigration and foreign work visas.

By this logic, we shouldn’t build a wall, we should build an airport and fly people in — all the better if that airport is located near Bridgeport and New Haven, which would make us a lot more attractive to the Amazons of the world.

The idea of tighter immigration restrictions sent Gioia on a rant.

“Our immigration policy is a disaster for Connecticut,” Gioia said. “Going back to 1980, all of our population growth is due to immigration . ... It boggles my imagination that we can bring these people over here, train them and educate them, they in many cases want to work here, and what do we do? We kick them out.”

Punctuating his remarks, he added, “Foreignborn people are 80 percent more likely to start a business than native-born Americans.”

I know what you’re thinking because part of my brain holds the same thought. Companies have abused foreign work rules to the detriment of many American workers by bringing people from overseas, especially in information technology and other computer trades, and paying them less than their U.S. citizen counterparts.

Allowing a flood of cheap foreign labor undermines worker pay at a time when corporations already pay a record low percentage of their profits to rank-and-file workers.

You’re also thinking that if the Connecticut employers sitting on those 25,000 unfilled jobs would raise the pay offers, people would come out of the woodwork to fill those jobs. They might even come from Texas and Florida, though not this weekend, with temperatures below zero.

The answer is balance. The pendulum may have swung too far as corporations emerging from the Great Recession abused employees and overused cheaper foreign workers. But now, exactly when the big problem really is a shortage of workers, as the jobless rate is low and companies finally want to hire, the pendulum on immigration has swung too far the other way.

Trump, of course, shrewdly appeals to disenfranchised, mostly white workers — many of them doing just fine, but angry at the perception that America is under siege by foreign workers.

But without a steady supply of workers, companies won’t necessarily buck up and pay more for the workers who walk in the door. They’ll take that work elsewhere — especially if they don’t have faith in the patchwork system of worker training programs.

Looking at national threats to growth, said Alissa DeJonge, chief economist at the Connecticut Economic Resource Center, “Immigration policy is probably the biggest piece, not just for the U.S., but for Connecticut specifically.”

It’s ironic that the answer for Trump and populist Republicans in Congress was to hand over the store to multinational corporations and financial services firms, some of the exact companies that abused the system to begin with, leading to the anger that put these politicians in power. Now, to pay for that gift, we have a tax policy that hurts the high-cost states, the ones creating economic activity.

“The optics are that people in the state of Connecticut are actually going to be hurt,” said Susan Coleman, professor of finance at the University of Hartford. “Whether that’s the reality, we don’t know.”

There’s a lot we don’t know, including why the government’s monthly survey of households shows the number of Connecticut residents with jobs rising nicely, while the monthly survey of employers shows jobs disappearing. We can’t all be crossing into New York and Massachusetts for jobs.

We also don’t know whether the new tax policy, combined with tighter immigration, will leave Connecticut too starved for workers to recover.

But we know this: Immigration and foreign work visas need to be a big part of Connecticut’s recovery. The tech entrepreneur in New Haven who can’t find the right people otherwise will tell you that.

The economist from South Asia who graduated with a Ph.D. from UConn, found work, settled in Connecticut and now fears that route is blocked will also tell it to you.