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Understanding population demographics is pretty straightforward because you don’t need high-level math to figure things out. The simple truth is that we need an organized immigration system, and we needed that yesterday. I’m not here to defend anyone who is here without having gone through the proper immigration or work permit process. However, we all need to acknowledge that the process has been broken for decades, and that as our workforce ages out, we need to fill important roles where technology has its limits.
We have a record number of retirees living today, and more are heading that way. With that comes greater, and more costly, health care needs. Take home health care, for example. According to a Bloomberg article from this morning, “Demand for such care is expected to swell as the U.S. population ages, and the industry has increasingly relied on immigrants to fill home health positions. Foreign-born people comprise roughly one in five U.S. workers, yet they account for more than 40% of home health aides and nearly 30% of personal care employment, according to U.S. government data.” Nursing is another associated profession facing significant and growing shortages.
Between rural America’s need for hands-on labor to support our agricultural sector and the health care needs of our aging population, the time is now to create an organized process to fill critical jobs. We simply do not have the number of people in succeeding generations to fill these gaps.
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