Mangayan is a personal care aide, a grueling and low-paid profession that happens to be one of the country’s fastest growing.
It is also increasingly filled with foreign-born, low-skilled workers like Mangayan, the kind now at the center of a national debate on immigration.
A proposal favored by a number of Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration would replace the current family-preference immigration system, which critics call “chain migration,” with one that favors skilled immigrants, while reducing admissions overall. Democrats have balked at the plan, while some Republicans have insisted it be a condition of any bill that legalizes the unauthorized young adults, known as “Dreamers,” who could soon lose their protection against deportation.
Those who study immigration and labor patterns have questioned the wisdom of restricting family-based immigration, a crucial source of low-skilled workers, many of whom hail from countries like Mexico and the Philippines, where Mangayan, 47, is from.
)
)
)
“In any plausible future scenario, the U.S. needs far more new low-skilled workers than high-skilled workers,” said Michael Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank, “so many that it will be impossible for native labor to fill all those jobs, even if native workers wanted to.”
According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis, among the 10 occupations expected to grow the most through 2026, only three require university degrees, all of them digital or data-focused: software developers, statisticians and mathematicians.
The two that will require the most new workers: personal care and home health aides, with 1.2 million new positions between them.
About 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day, and more than half will need long-term care, according to the Pew Research Center.
In 2017, 26 percent of personal care aides and home health aides were foreign born, a high, according to an analysis of official data by Brian Schaitkin, a senior economist at the Conference Board.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
MIRIAM JORDAN © 2018 The New York Times