the motion is adopted. accordingly, the house stands adjourned until 10:00 a.m. tomorrow for morning hour debate. >> the house as completed its business for the day. later in the week, they begin work on a dell blocking the u.s. from withdrawing from the past climate agreement. watch the house live on c-span. wednesday, at 10:00 p.m. eastern. william barr will testify before the senate judiciary committee on the mueller report. on thursday at 9:00 p.m. eastern, he will testify before the house judiciary committee life on c-span3, c-span.org and listen in on the free c-span radio app.

once, we were pbs. in 1979, a small network with an unusual name vote down -- rolled out an unusual idea. but the viewers decide what they want to see. c-span brings you unfiltered info about congress. in the 40 years since, the landscape has clearly changed. there is no monolithic media, broadcasting has given away to narrowcasting. youtube stars everything. -- are a thing. c-span's idea is still a thing. on television and online, c-span is your unfiltered view of government. you can make up your mind. >> at our table is deleterious.

he is the president of seo and the economic animation from here to talk about the new report on the nation's striking workforce. what did you find -- shrinking workforce. what did you find? >> this is a remarkable number. the competition country as a whole is aging rapidly. not just a national challenge. it is highly localized in certain regions. this is going to erode their economic and fiscal sustainability and they need to types of policy tools counteract the shrinking workforce. host: why is it happening? guest: is a combination of lower fertility rates, out migration of mostly skilled workers from those regions, and stable

immigration rates. nationally we are facing the slowest population growth we have seen in 80 years. we are seeing the first time in 100 years sustained low population growth overall. this is an unusual challenge. not one that we are used to dealing with as a country. typically, demographics have been an advantage for us as a country and separated us from other industrialized countries in terms of economic vitality. and in shrinking away some cases, the advantage is completely gone. host: what could happen? is notpopulation loss just a consequence of economic decline, it's also a cause. lenses throughe which to understand those challenges. the fiscal health of these local economies. you lose your tax base and tax revenues. a lot of the caring cost of a larger population and the infrastructure you build around that maintains.

you still have to pay as much, but your revenue base is shrinking. two, it erodes the housing market. you can see the consequences of decline. blight and vacancies set in. is also the staging ground for crime and other types of socioeconomic decay. relationshipusal loss between population loss and startup rates. host: i wonder to our viewers, if you are experiencing this where you live. what do you think is contributed to this? eastern/central part of the country, (202) 748-8000. in the mountain pacific area, (202) 748-8001. john lettieri, where is it the

worst and where are their glimmers of hope? guest: this challenge is highly localized in two particular regions. one is the midwest. the state of michigan lost 12 percent of its primate workforce. ohio lost 6%. you'll also find this in the upper northeast. entire states are losing their prime age population. every county in the states is losing prime age population. a lot of these postindustrial economies that have struggled to make the transition from manufacturing and heavy industry are bearing the brunt of this national issue. where it's bright is in the west. the west and the southeast tend to see the most buoyant, youngest, most vital population growth. presents a real challenge because the returns to those type of advantages. dense populations, big metro areas.

young workforce. those have a aggregating effect. that's why we are really calling for new attention to the scale of the challenge which i think is not fully appreciated as well as the fact that we have tools that we could be using to do something about it. host: what are those tools? guest: immigration policy could be one of the great advantages. the fact it is especially when it comes to skilled immigration, our policy is implicitly biased towards large coastal areas. allow look at the way we in the numbers, those policies tend to benefit places that are doing very well already and disadvantage places that have the highest need. in the are proposing paper is a heartland visa. this would allow welcoming communities throughout the country that are facing demographic challenges to become eligible for a dual opt in type

of program where immigrants choose to settle their and where the communities choose to host them. there's no risk of going to an unwelcoming place. these are places that have opted in based on their eligibility. this could be something that adds wind to the sales of any community. look at the city of dayton. the city of utica, new york. these are places that have affected some turnaround in their population growth. this is actually working in many places already, just without the programmatic support that washington can provide. host: what do you make of these numbers? the bureau of labor statistics. job openings versus people. work, 6.2 million. guest: that's the benefit of a tight labor market.

employers around the country are saying we can't find enough workers to fill positions that we have open which is a restraining factor for growth. any rational conversation about immigration would say if we have the advantage as a country of being a place where the most skilled entrepreneurial people from the country want to live -- we should connect those dots. this is one of the most rational things we can do in terms of the economic evidence. host: what type of migrant workers are you talking about that are needed in this country? host: -- guest: we are particularly focused on the skills in the paper. right now we let 65,000 skilled workers each year.

looking for something generally analogous in terms of scope to it provides a way for immigrants to connect with places, not just single employers. it is an employer driven program where you are tied to one employer. we are advocating for something that would be tied to place. if you choose to settle in dayton, you would be free to work anywhere in that labor market. but you are tied to that place for a term of living and working. an immigrant would be given a choice of hundreds or thousands depending on how many communities often. signallaces would try to , and so you have some matchmaking that goes on on the front end. focused on skills because that is where the economic evidence is the most clear and concise in terms of the benefits. .hey bring economic dynamism

they tend to be entrepreneurial. these immigrants bring not just supply, but demand. they provide more demand for local services and businesses. we think the evidence is very clear on the skilled immigrant side. a lot of these economies are agricultural. they did seasonal workers. a lot of the needs are on the lower skilled side of the spectrum. we should think more broadly than just the skilled side. we should start read the evidence is most obvious. host: we are talking with john lettieri, president and ceo of economic immigration group -- economic innovation group. trump says the u.s. is full. much of the nation has the opposite problem. an aging population and a declining birthrate among the nativeborn population means a shrinking workforce in many areas.

newly half of americans live in a country where the prime toking age population is 25 54. shrank over the last decade. ron in texas. europe first. -- you are up first. caller: here's what i was thinking about. 300,000 baby boomers retire every month. are those the jobs that they say are created? they are going from working and creating a salary to drawing social security. thatsay every month 200,000 jobs are created. are those the jobs they are talking about? retire,hen baby boomers those are not the jobs being created. the jobs being created right now are mostly pulling workers who are looking for work out of the nonemployment sector into full we are seeing

because of the tightness of the labor market is a lot of people who previously reported being unable to work are now finding work. it's the demand of the strong labor market: people off of the sidelines. of a lothis challenge of people retiring. we are hitting a time when baby boomers are increasingly exiting the workforce. that presents a challenge. had this article from the trustees report. ratio ofe that the workers paying taxes to beneficiaries receiving benefits will decline as the baby-boom replacedn ages and is at working ages with subsequent lower birthrate generations. what's the impact of this? guest: a simple numerator and denominator challenge. and to keep transfer programs

programs -- this really is just a math problem. ist national challenge localized in a lot of places that are facing their own fiscal challenges with paying pensions, challenges with paying into the kind of a sick services. you don't have a healthy tax base, you have to make the kind of cuts that make it harder to draw more people in. cutting arts from school programs. not providing the kind of resources to local police and fire departments. these are things that are solvable problems, but they cannot be solved without human capital. we have the example of what other countries have gone through ahead of us as they face their own demographic decline. it's not something we have to experience crude we have a choice. this is the role of policymaking. kyl in san ramon, california. good morning. i understand your point

about filling in some of the demographic needs for fire departments and all of that, but what about the effects of automation? see going around, things are getting more and more automated. we just need less and less workers. people may not need to commute to jobs because they work from home. i work from home most of the time. i wonder what the effect of all of that automation is on the demographics of our workforce. look at the industry and manufacturing and all of that. we are just office work automating things. that's my thought. guest: that's a great question. there's no doubt automation is playing a role in our economy in a way that is impactful, but it's not replacing workers wholesale. the stat you quoted earlier about the amount of open positions versus the amount of

available workers is just one data point in a number that show that the demand human labor is here, it's strong and it's not going away, and in particular the demand for skilled labor is here and not going away. i don't think we have to worry about having too many skilled workers in our economy. the places that drive today unquestionably are ones where skilled workers tend to congregate and we need to provide new pathways especially when we know based on all the evidence that there are plenty of skilled workers from around the world who would love to be there. in some cases we are talking about entire states. justis not a question of moved to a better opportunity. automation tends to complement human work, it doesn't tend to replace it entirely for most jobs.

we have always had a technological change influence the labor market. right now our problem is electric supply, not elect of demand. host: what are some communities, counties, cities doing who are decline in their population, eroding tax base. what did doing to try to get people to come to their communities? >> we don't really have to guess as to whether this could work. we have actual examples. there's a program called welcoming america that works to help them take the steps to market themselves and make themselves welcoming to new immigrants. the city of dayton is one of those places. has been one of the key factors in helping to turn around the local economy and helping to turn around population loss. dayton's peak was 260,000 people. 160,000ed down to people.

it has been a key factor in the local revitalization of that community. there is still a lot of work to justat goes beyond attracting human capital. you're not dealing with the scarcity in your taxpayers. you the flexibility to tackle and reinvent your economy in new ways. you you don't have the, have much fewer options and the options you have are much worse. it's going to be true on a national level as well. right now we enjoy an advantage that most countries never have, which is the ability to pick and when and how people want to be here. the u.s. has had primacy in the national conversation for a long time. i don't think we should assume it's always going to be true

that we have that kind of attractiveness. we think we should lean into that advantage. it will provide tools to communities that have the will to welcome and reinvent their economies but also need the resources they can provide on their own. host: what happens to wages in those communities where they are welcoming more immigrants? guest: they tend to go up. this is true everywhere that you want to take for granted that the economy is doing well. it is clear and consistent in the data that are thriving places today with high-paying labor markets and a lot of access to economic opportunity are places where skilled people congregate. we want to replicate those type of characteristics in more places around the country. not everywhere is going to be silicon valley and they don't

have to be. they just need to do more with the tools that they have. in many cases they have anchor institutions like a large universities. they don't have the kind of dynamic bottom-up economy that you see in healthy and thriving places to one thing that we know contracts to that is skilled immigration. this is a challenge on top of the demographic challenge. with the great recession, rates of entrepreneurship bounced to historic lows. immigrants are disproportionately entrepreneurial. twice as likely to start a business as a domestically born person. we know that bringing them to a local labor market has a dynamic effect on business and the business environment that you want to be able to replicate. host: let's go to kathy in ohio. caller: i think that bringing in

skilled workers actually brings down wages. we have a lot of college students out there who can't even find a job. what's your answer to that? thet: i'm not familiar that -- with any evidence that the program brings down wages for local residents. i also want to distinguish what we are proposing. this would be a different program that is not tied to any single employer. wages in the communities that don't have immigrants are particularly low. correlation between local population of immigrants and overall economic health is very strong. correlation between lack of immigrants and other economic malaise is very strong. the preponderance of evidence that we look at across every field says that skilled immigrants in the community has an uplifting effect for everybody. more opportunity. they are bringing supply of work and demand for local business.

base's a broader customer on top of the fact that they are bringing tax payments to improve the local fiscal conditions. they are occupying vacant houses. a new emigrant in san francisco might be marginally displacing someone who there. in dayton or akron or south bend, that's just not the case. there's a lot of unused capacity we want to put back to you's. that means the entire economy thrives and is more likely to succeed. so the evidence is very strong. host: brian in illinois, good morning to you. good morning. if you flip the coin, i have had some college level business and econ classes. if there was really a shortage of workers, wages would be rising a lot. but for the past four decades, they haven't. they have been stagnant. you are representing corporate america and here's what

corporate america wants. they want a vast pool of workers that are desperate to work that will take any wage they can get. we have corporate america right now. record level profits. record level. but they've kept wage levels just minisculely creeping up because of best levels of immigration. your story doesn't add up. i'm familiar with the i.t. industry. or the just a corporation. they made their i.t. department train the replacements from india and then they fired all their i.t. workers and have the replacements work for 50% of the money. that's corporate america. corporate america, all the people in the sea suites are grabbing all the money. host: let's get a response. guest: wages are actually going up fastest for the lowest end.

exactly what you expect to see in a tight labor market is happening with wages rising very quickly at the bottom end. i want to distinguish this from the current policy. aat we are proposing is not perpetuation of current policy. it would be directed to places that are clearly struggling and left outside of the national growth benefits that we have seen for much of the country. the evidence is very strong, skilled immigration does not bring wages down for domestic workers. it does not erode the local health and vitality of the economy. needed and this is not something corporate america is asking for. this is something mayors are asking for. when you look at the city of , when theyyork became a refugee resettlement area, i saw for the first time positive growth in their local economy and if you talk to people who come from these communities, they say that was a

transformative turning point in the history of their community. these were classic examples of dying cities. thanksve found new life to become the welcoming to immigrants and refugees. we don't have to guess. we don't have to rely on theory. we can look at local examples where this is already working and local leaders are connecting the dots and we can go off those in a practical way. we are talking about skilled immigration where we've that a onlysmall number in and through one door. katie in norman, oklahoma. caller: question and comment. i don't know if skilled immigration is the way that we solve this.

i moved from the east coast. i'm a millennial. they price me out of living. basically i couldn't live there anymore. main point is i think the issue actually comes in where and are requiring degrees ton of work experience and paying very little with novell of -- with no benefits. guest: certainly that is happening for some workers and that's a challenge for some workers and there's no doubt that new jobs being created are ones that certainly compared to pre-recession require higher educational levels and higher skills. but letting more skilled immigrants come to this country is another way of letting more employers come to this country. skilled immigrants are disproportionately entrepreneurial they are more likely to start a business. prime challenges is a shrinking number of local businesses.

it's hard to have job growth with wages and benefits without a growing number of employers and without growing demand for local business. with new skilled immigrants you supply, but demand. this is a way of helping to revitalize and add the kind of attributes that any healthy local economy takes for granted but that you can't take for the country.ch of 80% of the counties are using primate workforce. there's no way to argue that's a healthy statistic. policyly with federal are very few levers you can pull to help counteract that. the most obvious is a change in immigration policy. we can look at local examples where this is working. in so allow places to opt no one is compelled. our guess is that a vast majority of places that would be eligible gladly opt in because

their options are so limited in the power of immigration is so strong for communities. host: roof is watching in kansas. caller: good morning. i'm very pro-immigration. if we couldondering have the same kind of program for inner city. if blacks, hispanics, or whites were unable to find jobs and unable to have a livable situation because of expenses and so forth if they might he offered training and repositioning and replacement into the areas that are needing more young, healthy workers. would it not be a benefit? it would be another type of immigration. would it not also be a benefit to get people who are already in this country every situated voluntarily into something that would benefit both sides.

guest: i think that's a really interesting perspective. from my perspective i think we should experiment with a lot of different ways of attracting newforces and giving incentives for people to get off the sidelines and into the labor market. there are interesting ideas relating to the earned income tax credit or a wage subsidy to provide a stronger pull for people on the sidelines into the workforce. you also have local economies like the city of tulsa that has offered incentives for teleworkers to come settle in their city. they provided a cash benefit for have relatively high-paying jobs and a lot of mobility to congregate in tulsa. seeing a lot of this local experimentation happening around the country. where you also need support is at the federal level for a

broadly advantageous policy that helps to direct and open the pathway for skilled human to reach places our current policy doesn't really encourage. connie is in tennessee. you are on the air. caller: ok. up corporateng malfeasance. only because it's talked about , but it'sthat now been going on for a long time. and i know this to be a fact. i live in tennessee, but i know employers send people to mexico to bring them back legally. they use them.

hope that we can change our tax laws so corporations pay their fair share. and i think that we should have immigration. and i think we should definitely be welcoming people to our country. living in horrible conditions. host: for folks who want to learn more about this report, they go to ei g.org. what should people look at? guest: number one is the sense of urgency. this is a real challenge. we used to talk about the country of japan as being one of the dangers of decline. about 40 million americans live in a community that looks like demographically.

we know that this problem is here. we know that it's coming in larger waves in the years to come. the sense of urgency that needs to come with that is one piece we hope people take away from it. the other is a sense of hope. tools to actually address this issue and address it favorably. it requires policy action. i would say if you are an average reader in your community, talking to your mayor , calling your congressman. to revive theg in aspirational american spirit that we have taken the granted. the evidence is here in terms of the challenge, but >> c-span's "washington journal," with every day with news and policy issues that impact you. tuesday morning, need to impeach's founder will discuss

impeaching president trump. then, alan dershowitz will join us to talk about his opposition to efforts to impeach the president. then, we will talk about proposed federal regulations regarding electronic medical records. be sure to watch "washington journal" tuesday morning. join the discussion. on tuesday, acting homeland security secretary kevin mcaleenan testifies in front of a subcommittee. watch live at nine clock a.m. eastern on c-span3, online, or listen on the c-span radio app. is stopping atus middle and high schools across the country to meet and award the winners of our studentcam video competition. we were recently in providence, rhode island, and met with second prize winners.

they are from trinity academy for the performing arts. >> this is our first time entering, and we put in a lot of hours of editing, contacting, and it was a long journey. we were very excited and happy in we look forward to participating again next year. >> we cannot believe it, and we look forward to next year. year think it is our first entering something, we didn't even think of it, we just entered to see how far we could go. to think we got second place on the first try it was my mind. >> to watch all the winning entries from this years studentcam contest, go to studentcam.org. >> white house press secretary sarah sanders stopped to talk with reporters outside the white house and took questions on an upcoming meeting with democratic leaders on infrastructure. the president's plan to send

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