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.”
Yeah, but we lead the world in the number of transgressive artists, gender theorists and post-modern LitCrit professionals. Take THAT, China!
That’s OK. Turns out due to the economy, Boomers can’t retire yet, anyway.
Such baloney. I heard this nonsense about a shortage of teachers aback in the 1980s. Back then it was that all the people who got into technical fields after Sputnik were going to retire. So where’s the crisis? It never happened.
It’s just a trick to get people to go into fields like nursing and teaching so they can continue to pay low wages. Instead of encouraging people to chase their dreams, make money and enjoy life.
Southern California is already a third world country. Nor is this the only case. This is the result of uncontrolled immigration. Will the voters do something about the situation? They control it, after all. And the churches, who hide and protect illegal aliens, esp. Hispanics, only exacerbate the problem. When do we grow terminally weary of the “liberal” brainwashing re: diversity, multiculturalism and all the other platitudes? Larry
Sidney,
There [i]is[/i] a shortage of nurses. My wife is a nurse; she sees it all the time. If there weren’t a shortage, why would places put up with no-call, no-shows? They know that if they fire these parasites, they can turn right around and get another job somewhere else — and the employer will have to hire any new warm body they can find with a license, and train them.
The same is (almost) true of science and math teachers for grades 7-12.
I’ve heard it explained that the smart, dedicated women who used to become nurses and math teachers due to the limited options available are now doctors and engineers, but that wages (especialy in teaching) have not fully adapted to this change.
There is also the problem that we have very restrictive immigration rules when it comes to skilled workers. Enough so that companies are opening locations in Canada to take advantage of their relatively easy immagration for skilled & educated applicants.
The US nursing shortage is leading to a worldwide shortage, as foreign nurses abandon their home countries to get higher wages in America. So I’ve heard.
There is no such thing as a long term shortage of labor – only a shortage of labor at the wage currently being paid for it. People aren’t going into nursing and science/math teaching because the quality of life stinks relative to other jobs. We live in a market economy. You get what you pay for.
The trouble is with government regulation and payment by government. Teachers are paid by government, and so salaries stay low. Hospitals are largely dependent on Medicare Medicaid (who barely pays breakeven rates, and does not subsidize the uninsured, which are required to be seen for free. Thus salaries of hospital workers stay low. Physicians have higher salaries mostly because they are able to refuse to see patients in the office on the basis of payment (they are forced to see all patients in the hospital). Thus, there is no physician shortage except for those fields where either malpractice is an issue (Neurosurgery, Obstetrics) or where most patients are going to have Medicare (Geriatrics, Internal Medicine, Neurology) or Medicaid (Pediatric subspecialties).