Think immigrants are “stealing” American jobs? Think again.

In this fiery episode of Immigration Weekly, Rosanna Berardi – immigration lawyer, former border officer, and daughter of an immigrant – breaks down the myths and exposes the hard truths behind U.S. foreign labour. From overwhelmed hospitals and shuttered rural clinics to tech giants desperate for engineers and farms that can’t fill roles, Rosanna makes it crystal clear: this isn’t politics, it’s economics and survival. She takes you behind the curtain of a broken system – one clogged with outdated laws, impossible processes, and an employer pool drowning in red tape.

(Whether you’re Team Uncle Jim or simply trying to understand why the immigration debate never cools down, this one’s got something to make you pause, rethink, and probably rant to a friend.)

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Transcript

Everyone’s talking about U.S. immigration law, but nobody really knows how it works. I’m Rosanna Berardi. I’m the daughter of an immigrant, a former immigration inspector at the border, university professor, and founder and managing partner of Berardi Immigration Law.

I’ve done nothing but U.S. immigration law for over 30 years, and it’s time to stop the misinformation on all sides. I’m going to tell you how it all works, the inside story. This is Immigration Weekly with Rosanna Berardi.

Hi, everyone. It’s me, your favorite immigration lawyer, Rosanna Berardi, and welcome to my podcast, Immigration Weekly with Rosanna Berardi, where we’ll cut through the noise and let you know what’s really happening. So today, this is going to be a good one because we hear this all the time.

The Reality Behind Foreign Labour in the U.S.

It’s in the news constantly. Do we need foreign labor? Immigrants steal our jobs.

We have enough Americans. Employers do this because they don’t want to pay wages. This gets debated everywhere, on TV, social media.

I have family members. I don’t know about you. They’re always saying this.

Employers, you know, they’re just taking a shortcut. Well, my friends, I have news for you. This isn’t about, he said, she said, foreigners, Americans, blah, blah, blah.

This is survival. Foreign labor hits our economies, bottom line, healthcare, national security, community survival. Now, I don’t mean to sound extremist, but here’s some fun facts.

Did you know that immigrants make up nearly 18% of our total workforce? Think about that. That is a huge number of people.

Have you been to a hospital or doctor’s office recently? You’ll see a lot of immigrants there. Almost 30% of physicians in America are foreign trained.

Now, I know you probably have your uncle in your background chirping, well, why don’t we have any American doctors? These foreign doctors are taking all jobs away from American doctors. Guess what, Uncle Jim?

Guess what? We do not have enough Americans in our medical schools to cover the need of physicians in the United States. Hence the reliance on foreign trained and foreign born physicians.

By 2030, there’s going to be a whopping 1.1 more nurses needed than today. That’s just in five years. Have you been to the ER lately?

Anywhere? Even though we have a great healthcare system here in the U.S., the waiting times atrocious, takes forever to be seen. It’s just a very messy, messy system.

Some rural hospitals, in fact, are shutting down their wings because of staffing shortages. It’s nuts. That’s just healthcare.

Agriculture? Don’t get me started. 73% of agricultural workers are foreign born.

They mostly come in under a category called the H-2A or H-2B. It’s for agricultural workers, really clunky immigration category. It’s how people come in lawfully.

Think about that number, 73%. Why don’t we have Americans doing that? Guess what?

Americans don’t want to do that. We represent clients that secure H-2A, H-2B visas all the time. We have to run advertisements for the positions in a local newspaper.

And guess how many Americans apply to work on a golf course, or to do landscaping, or to do any type of agriculture picking? Guess how many Americans apply to a typical ad, say, in the Detroit News? Zero.

Zip. Nada. That’s why employers turn to foreign labor.

And don’t forget the tech sector. I’ve been doing this for 28 years. Tons and tons of tech roles are fulfilled by foreign nationals.

They have cybersecurity, software development, engineering shortages, just to name a few. Big problem, especially in inner cities and remote areas. It’s a huge, huge problem in hospitality as well.

Home health care. God, have you been to a nursing home? Horrible.

Construction workers. So we already rely on foreign labor. The question is, does it work?

The answer is yes and no. It works because we have some jobs filled, but we need more. And there’s this yammering that goes on and on.

Why don’t we have enough Americans? We have 330 million Americans, yada, yada, yada, sis boom bop. It’s true.

We do. We’re a huge country. We have lots and lots and lots of Americans.

But guess what? We don’t have enough of them going into STEM, science, technology, engineering, math, medicine. We don’t have a lot of those majors.

Medical school is incredibly difficult, incredibly expensive, and not a job that just anyone wants to do. You’re almost 30 years old before you can actually make money. And then the lifestyle, difficult stuff.

The Complex Process of Hiring Foreign Workers

So how do people become legal? People say, oh, well, you know, employers, they just do this because it’s faster and cheaper and yada, yada, yada. Okay.

If you’re an employer and you can’t find an American to do your job, this is one of two ways that you can bring somebody in. Let me know how appealing they sound to you. You can sponsor them for an H-1B.

Worst product in the world. I’ve been selling it since 1997 under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. The H-1B category is for individuals who hold a bachelor’s degree and are coming to work in a position that requires a bachelor’s degree or higher.

Okay. It’s for professionals. That’s great.

That’s fine. What’s so hard about it? Congress, in their infinite wisdom, a long time ago decided to put limitations on the number of H-1Bs that they would issue each year to protect American workers.

That number, 85,000 annually. Sounds like a decent number. Last year, the Citizenship and Immigration Services Agency received over 400,000 applicants.

It is a lottery, professional lottery, like a raffle. The only thing is your business future depends on the outcome. You have a 30% chance.

If you sponsor somebody for H-1B status, which you can only do one time a year, and if you’re lucky and selected, you file it in March and your employee can use it in October. Very convenient for workforces. Only 30% of people that apply through that way get an actual work permit.

If you’re an employer that needs to fill some labor that is professional level, that’s an option, but it’s a pretty crummy one in my opinion. All right. Well, what about everybody else that doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree?

Well, there’s a way of getting unskilled workers in the U.S. You have to demonstrate through supervised labor recruitment from the U.S. Department of Labor that you cannot find Americans. I’ve been saying for 28 years, you have to beat the bushes to find Americans. How do you do that?

Well, the supervised recruitment for the Department of Labor says you have to put two print ads in a newspaper. Whoa. Hello.

Can you update your criteria? You have to put advertisements on indeed.com, you know, any of the job sites where people look, LinkedIn. You have to do public advertising.

You have to interview anyone that is basically required, and you have to document why he or she isn’t qualified for the job. This takes years. If you could jump through all these hoops and we have hundreds of these cases, you can get somebody a green card.

But again, if I’m an employer today at Variety Immigration Law and I need a lawyer tomorrow, I don’t have time for either of these categories. You can’t cut wages. There are built-in prevailing wage requirements under both these categories, and God help you if you are Indian or Chinese or Philippines or Mexican, because the number of individuals from those countries is limited.

So even if you are selected in one of these really crummy categories, your place in line is really, really long. And for anybody like your Uncle Jim that thinks hiring foreign labor is a shortcut and people do it to save money and employers are just doing it because they don’t want to help Americans, wrong. This is a multi-year, really expensive legal fee, government fee, multi-year legal maze.

I can tell you unequivocally, my firm has represented thousands of clients. Corporations, big, small, medium, multinational, local hospitals, tech companies, you name it, we’ve represented them in the last 20 years. Why do they go through this pain and suffering of this terrible, horrible Immigration Nationality Act to try and fill their labor needs?

Why Foreign Labour Is Essential – And What Needs to Change

They go through it because they have no other choice. They cannot find Americans, so they have to seek foreign work elsewhere. Do we need foreign labor in America?

Yes. So we’ve represented all these clients and people say to me all the time, oh, you must do deportation or refugee or blah, blah, blah. No, we do work for business professionals, software engineers, robotics engineers, physicians, soccer coaches, celebrities, biotech scientists, all kinds of medical professionals, PTs, OTs, nurses.

There is not one employer that calls us and says, oh, hi, we’re calling. We need to sponsor a physician to work at our hospital, but we’re calling you because we want to save money and not spend as much as we would on an American worker. Nobody says that when they hear how long it’s going to take and how much it’s going to cost.

There’s usually a long pause or a gasp, but they go forward anyway. What if we were to shut down all the foreign labor? Well, interesting.

This administration, remember, they campaigned on the largest mass deportation in American history. That’s what we are promised. That’s what we’ve been waiting for.

Guess what? It’s not working. You know why?

Because anyone in the United States, whether you’re here legally or unlawfully, is entitled to due process. Due process means your day in court in front of a judge. You can’t just pick up people, put them on a plane, and send them to their home country.

Doesn’t work that way. Huh. So if it’s not working that way, hmm, the Trump administration pivoted and said, here’s an idea.

We’re going to go after the employers that employ unlawful individuals, and we’re going to do mass raids at these employers. Now, I can’t say I totally disagree with that strategy because, um, hello, employer, you shouldn’t be breaking the U.S. immigration law and having 300 people on your staff that have fake documentation, and the employer should be sanctioned for that. So the government started doing that a week or two ago.

They started going through all these, you know, companies, manufacturers, Home Depot. This is the genesis of the riots in Los Angeles. And lo and behold, as an immigration lawyer in Buffalo, New York, predicted what happened.

That initiative was walked back. Do you know why? It’s all over in the newspaper.

The Trump administration was contacted by, hmm, the American Association of Restaurants, Hotels, Manufacturers, Agriculture, and all of these groups are saying, stop the presses. We do not have any workers. We don’t have anybody to fill these positions.

If you deport all these people or put them into custody, we have no one. Uncle Jim’s going to say, well, good, we should have Americans. Well, Uncle Jim, good luck finding them.

And second off, good luck paying them what the wages for the, um, immigrants are being paid, even though there’s that prevailing wage provision. It would decimate the economy. And guess what?

As predicted, the Trump administration walked these policies back. So what’s happening now? Do we need foreign labor?

We do. I don’t care if you like that or not. I don’t care if you’re Democrat, Republican, anything in between, what side of the aisle you’re on.

We need foreign labor. Why? We do not have enough Americans pursuing majors that fulfill critical gaps in medicine, tech, engineering, anything STEM related.

We’re not trying to replace Americans, people. We are trying to support them and help fill the gaps that exist. Foreign labor is not a threat.

I’m not saying that because I’m an immigration lawyer. This is not a self-serving statement. They would say, ah, why are you going to write me comments?

Of course you want foreign labor. You’re an immigration lawyer. No, I can tell you from the labor market and the economy that foreign labor is a solution to worker shortages, aging demographics, and industry demands.

What can really fix this problem? Remember, three branches of government. We are hearing from the executive branch like there’s no tomorrow.

We have the legislative branch, the people that make the law. Have you heard from Congress during this administration since January 20th? Not a peep on immigration.

They have the majority. This happens with both parties, which is why my team still will say, hashtag where is Congress? Congress needs to fix the law.

If we don’t want foreign labor, if we don’t want all of this mess, Congress needs to retool the law that really hasn’t been tweaked since 1996, almost 30 years ago. It’s hard to find employees. I struggle with it each and every day, and I’m in a professional industry.

I can’t imagine what it’s like in agriculture, in technology, in medicine. Trust me, employers do not want to do this, but there’s simply not enough Americans to fulfill the labor gaps. So take that all with a grain of salt.

When you hear people moaning and groaning, ah, blah, this is just a tactic. Employers are cheaping out, blah, blah, blah. They’re not.

They’re doing this because they have to.

This is Immigration Weekly with Rosanna Berardi. Stay tuned next week.

I’m going to cut through the noise and tell you how it really works. This was Immigration Weekly with Rosanna Berardi. Thanks for joining.

Be sure to connect with me, Rosanna Berardi, on LinkedIn, or go to our law firm at berardiimmigrationlaw.com. And if you don’t want to miss the latest and greatest, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and share this with your friends.

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