Tony Payan, “America Is Facing Severe Labor Shortages. Expanding the TN Visa Can Help” (Houston: Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, March 4, 2024), https://doi.org/10.25613/ZS5A-EW63.
The U.S. is facing a serious labor shortage, especially in key industries like construction and agriculture. This is mostly thanks to the impacts of COVID-19 on the economy in the past four years, but dramatic demographic changes are also playing an important role: Population growth, for instance, is slowing, with U.S. birth rates dropping drastically in the past decade. The country is also graying, and quickly. By 2060, nearly 1 in 4 Americans will be over 65 years old. With Boomers retiring at a fast clip, the country will increasingly rely on immigration — which is itself slowing down — to maintain a young and engaged workforce.
Allowing more migrants through our borders would help promote the capable workforce the country needs. But the prospect is increasingly unpopular, at least among legislators — many of whom profit politically from taking a hardline stance against migration.
But some facts about today’s American workforce should make our politicians take pause. Despite congressional gridlock on immigration reform and general doubts surrounding the role of immigrants both with and without permanent legal status in the U.S. economy, U.S. labor markets are relying on a huge number of noncitizens, including temporary workers with employment authorization visas and unauthorized workers, to make the economy run. These are in addition to the country’s 12.7 million permanent residents, who are not citizens although they may be eligible for citizenship.
First, the country employs millions of migrants who entered or are living in the country illegally. According to some counts, there are as many as 10.57 million people residing in the U.S. without legal status, most of whom are part of the workforce. Additionally, millions of noncitizens are permitted to work through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protected Status programs or under asylum law. And on top of that are the many people legally employed through various visas, including high-tech workers with H1-B visas, seasonal workers with H2-A and H2-B visas, and so on. Altogether, these workers fill critical gaps and boost innovation in all kinds of industries. They contributed $2 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2016 and nearly $500 billion in state, local, and federal taxes in 2018. In other words, the U.S. already relies on a huge number of workers who are neither citizens nor permanent residents — but who contribute significantly to our economy and perhaps should be rewarded accordingly.
One group of temporary workers participates in the U.S. labor force through a visa that is often underestimated and overlooked, but has already proven efficient and convenient: the TN visa. The TN visa was created as part of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and in 2020 was grandfathered into the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. It has quickly become a pivotal pathway for attracting talented professionals and technical workers to the United States. This is in part because the TN visa is easy to get, is cheaper than other visas, can be renewed indefinitely, and doesn’t have the caps by country or total number that other visas do. The catch is this: It can only be obtained by Canadians and Mexicans, and it includes only 63 occupational categories.
Despite these limitations, the TN visa has already shown its utility. Over time, hundreds of thousands of workers from Canada and Mexico have used the visa to obtain temporary employment in the U.S., filling workforce gaps that tend to go unnoticed precisely because authorized noncitizen workers are occupying those positions. The visa has enormously benefited U.S. businesses and industries, but the pathway it provides for the U.S. to close its growing workforce gaps — and for the legal, orderly integration of North American labor markets — has been largely overlooked.
The TN visa remains poised to fill in critical U.S. workforce gaps — in a way that promotes order and rule of law. The country is undergoing major demographic shifts, and in the absence of congressional willingness to open new visa categories, expanding the TN visa can serve the U.S. economy while helping integrate the North American workforce in a way that is palatable to those concerned by unauthorized migration. It would also allow employers and workers to find each other more easily, with little or no government intervention.
Congress should expand the types of professionals who qualify for the TN visa. If this proves politically infeasible, the visa category should be regulatorily reinterpreted to include more professions and technical abilities. This would give the American labor market the boost it will require in the coming decades and help make our workforce one of the most competitive in the world by virtue of being well integrated with the rest of North America.
The U.S. economy remains the most dynamic in the world. Its GDP grew 5.9% in 2021, 2.1% in 2022, and 2.8% in 2023. But American labor markets will demand more workers, and Congress is unlikely to deliver them through immigration reform. Thus, we are left with the visa categories we already have — and the TN visa is both underemployed and among the most advantageous for workers and employers.
It should be used more. Policymakers and government should look to the TN visa to promote competition, bring more order to human mobility in North America, and promote ongoing efforts to integrate, in particular, the U.S. and Mexican labor markets.
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