Lack of skilled workers will lead to crisis, experts say; immigrants must replace retiring Boomers

[DeepModem Mom]

LAT: Lack of skilled workers will lead to fiscal crisis, experts say
Demographers, economists and employers are advocating more investment in training and education for the immigrants needed to replace the huge outgoing crop of baby boomers.
By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
April 21, 2008

With baby boomers preparing to retire as the best educated and most skilled workforce in U.S. history, a growing chorus of demographers and labor experts is raising concerns that workers in California and the nation lack the critical skills needed to replace them.

In particular, experts say, the immigrant workers needed to fill many of the boomer jobs lack the English-language skills and basic educational levels to do so. Many immigrants are ill-equipped to fill California's fastest-growing positions, including computer software engineers, registered nurses and customer service representatives, a new study by the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute found.

Immigrants -- legal and illegal -- already constitute almost half of the workers in Los Angeles County and are expected to account for nearly all of the growth in the nation's working-age population by 2025 because native-born Americans are having fewer children. But the study, based largely on U.S. Census data, noted that 60% of the county's immigrant workers struggle with English and one-third lack high school diplomas.

The looming mismatch in the skills employers need and those workers offer could jeopardize the future economic vitality of California and the nation, experts say. Los Angeles County, the largest immigrant metropolis with about 3.5 million foreign-born residents, is at the forefront of this demographic trend.

"The question is, are we going to be a 21st century city with shared prosperity, or a Third World city with an elite group on top and the majority at poverty or near poverty wages?" asked Ernesto Cortes Jr., Southwest regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a leadership development organization. "Right now we're headed toward becoming a Third World city. But we can change that."...

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immiglabor21apr21,1,5043132,full.story

[Warpy]

1. But but but but Boomers are putting too much stress on the system!

They're costing us too much in health care! We can't afford them!

Oh, wait, you mean that for all these years they've been the competent people holding the whole thing together?

Oh no!

[Demeter]

7. It's Not Like Boomers Can Retire, Anyway

At least not in the second half born 1955-1961.

[Warpy]

8. We in the first cohort saw our involuntary pension contributions

ripped off by corporations every time we changed jobs for the first chunk of our working lives and it was perfectly legal for them to do so. We also took the brunt of the economic disasters in the 70s and 80s, when massive unemployment made sure we'd abandon our pension contributions in corporation after corporation.

The second cohort is still young enough to benefit from a swing of the economic pendulum to the left. The game is over for the first. We're old, we're tired, and most of us will be working until we drop.

[diane in sf]

11. Many of the first third aren't retiring any time soon themselves...

[Skittles]

13. I hear you there, Demeter

absolutely

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. an open immigration policy has always been a boon to our country

we are a nation of immigrants. We grow, advance and become stronger with more of them.

There have been four major attacks on immigrants, starting with the Know Nothing Party that led to the election of some Illinois president. (His republican party was the most liberal, what a change they have gone through)

The second came up as a result of the potato famine, the third was a response to the massive migration from WWI, the third was related to WWII, and now, the GOP has been using fear-mongering tactics against immigration based on "terror"

[Turbineguy]

3. My friend's 16 year old son

has dropped out of high school to devote his entire effort to flipping burgers at Burger King.

If I was the manager of such a place I'd fire his ass pronto.

[madrchsod]

4. this story is so wrong on so many levels

i really do`t have the time to point all what is wrong . who hires these people to write this bullshit?

[DeepModem Mom]

5. If you have time at some point, I'd be interested in hearing your view.

I haven't seen, or read, much on this topic.

[LongTomH]

6. I agree with madrchsod and here's why

First, even during the tech boom, foreign workers on 41B visas were replacing mid-career IT professionals - people in their 40's or early 50's. Now, they'll be replacing the rest of the boomers and the 30-something IT people who probably haven't paid off their college loans yet.

Second, retire my ass! Boomers leave their jobs when those jobs are outsourced, replaced by 41B foreign workers, or just 're-engineered' - downsized, right-sized or otherwise.

Third, there are plenty of IT people out there with the necessary skills; a lot of them currently unemployed. Most could be productive with brief, intensive refresher courses, if either the state or employers were willing to invest in their skills instead of replacing them with cheaper labor.

And, I would also like to hear your views in more detail.

[Extend a Hand]

12. Yup. 290 IT workers (including me) got laid off

last week. The jobs are going to India and China.

[DeepModem Mom]

14. Thanks for your post, LongTomH. You make good points...

and I think there's some agreement from others in this thread.

[mrreowwr_kittty]

9. Meanwhile, one third of our kids are dropping out of school.

And a shockingly high percentage of adults are functionally illiterate, and not qualified for those tech positions. No more fucking visas until THAT problem is addressed. I'm for open immigration but I'm not for companies being able to shirk their responsibilites to the community and create their own underclass. No visas for any company that doesn't make a substantial investment in local schools and training programs.

[psychmommy]

10. registered nurses and software engineers.

they are training foreigners when so many folks are out of work and need training because their jobs are gone. i thought they already outsourced all of the customer service jobs. what about the welfare to work moms, who are working minimum wage jobs and are now our working poor. what about our swollen unemployment ranks. i pray our next president puts a kibosh on this bull crap. we need decent jobs with decent pay for our citizens first. no training should be offered to another countries citizens before our own.

[AdHocSolver]

15. Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

Before corporations started outsourcing computer jobs, lots of people went to school (including me) to learn programming skills. Because there were so many IT jobs, many of us got jobs before we even graduated.

Then in the late 1990's, early 2000's, businesses stopped investing in new computer systems. The market had become "saturated". Very quickly, jobs started to disappear. So, people took the appropriate action: they stopped enrolling in computer courses. Why go to school if there will be no job in the field when you graduate.

At the same time, corporations started nickel-and-diming programmers. They stopped hiring permanent employes and switched to hiring contractors. For a while, contractors were better paid. Also, those of us who were older, couldn't get "permanent" jobs because one, we were "over-qualified" (i.e., had worked our way up to higher salaries), and two, being "older", the cost of benefits, such as health insurance, would be greater. So older, more experienced workers were seldom hired.

So with corporations refusing to hire "older" workers, and the younger people choosing other careers after seeing what was happening to the experienced programmers, the businesses "created" the worker "shortage" that they decried. Businesses discouraged Americans from entering the field or continuing to work in the field, and the "shortage" of technical workers became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is only one solution for Americans: Stop the importation of cheap labor, so that Americans can then compete for jobs. Then, watch Americans go back to school to get a technical education. Moreover, I worked with some "immigrant" technical workers. They were no more competent than the Americans.

Moreover, many of the imported workers are young and lack experience. They have no more education or skills than the Americans that they replace. They often have less experience and skills than the workers that they replace. Their main "virtues" are that they work dirt cheap, and even more importantly from management's view, they can be deported on a whim should they become "troublesome". The American manager can literally destroy the foreigner's career and gives them immense power over their subordinates. This is an unstated advantage that managers don't mention.

[madmom]

16. "no child left behind" works again!

[alarimer]

17. No, there aren't enough skilled workers willing to work for shit wages.

Companies would rather pay illegal immigrant-level wages and then they will bitch about not being able to find "skilled" workers. Well no wonder, you get what you pay for, you fucking vampires. Fuck corporations.

[Joanne98]

18. Immigrants aren't anymore skilled than anybody here.

This is BS!

[Juche]

19. Who would want to work in IT nowadays

I have heard far too many horror stories about that field to want to be near it.

As far as RNs, schools that teach nursing get far far more applications than students they take in. I think a program I was in before I changed my major only accepted about 20% of us who took the pre-reqs and the application exam, and of those only about 60% graduated. So for every 100 people who set out to become an RN, only about 12 made it. Of those twelve, roughly 4-5 will seriously consider or actually leave the profession in part due to overwork due to the fact that there aren't enough nurses.

How is immigration a solution for either of these problems? Raise the cap on the number of RN students admitted, help prevent them from dropping out of the academic program and work on retention in the field. That and treat IT workers with dignity and US workers will be able and willing to do those jobs.

I'm confused as to why someone who speaks english as a second language and doesn't understand american customs would be a better customer service representative than a native born person.

Another problem is that immigration takes talented workers away from countries that desperately need them. I was reading recently about the fact that taking healthcare workers out of Africa and importing them to EUrope or the US should be a human rights violation. I can see the point. Taking a doctor out of zimbabwe with maybe 1 doctor per 50,000 people and putting him in the US with 2.4 doctors per 1,000 people is inhumane. I remember seeing a TV show about medical tourism and an Indian doctor who went back to his home country (He was pediatric cardiology I think) because there were barely a handful of pediatric cardiologists in India while there were hundreds in the US. India, Africa, Latin America & Asia need skilled workers in IT, science and healthcare to pull themselves out of poverty. Stealing all theirs is inhuman.

[Phred42]

20. ARE YOUY INSANE?! No one will be able to retire

[lib2DaBone]

21. K&R No one is going to retire.... Thanks to Bush

....DID YOU WANT PAPER OR PLASTIC?