America Is Running Out of Workers. One Overlooked Visa Path Could Help.

Baby boomers are leaving the U.S. workforce in record numbers, taking decades of institutional knowledge and specialized expertise with them. The result is more than a generational shift: America is heading toward a potentially severe labor shortage.

Businesses are looking for ways to close the gap, but one solution—expanding skilled immigration—remains politically fraught.

Yet, employers may not need to wait for Congress.

Existing visa pathways, paired with workforce training, could offer a way to address the immediate shortage while building the skilled-worker pipeline America will need in the years ahead.

America has a workforce problem that AI can't automate away

Recent investigations have shown that the labor shortage in America could reach nearly 6 million workers by 2032, hitting healthcare and skilled trades the hardest. It is harder for AI is harder to absorb because they happen in the physical world and still depend mostly on human judgement.

Think of a nurse adjusting care at a bedside, an electrician tracing a fault inside an old building, or a counselor reading a patient's hesitation. They all respond to messy, often unpredictable conditions that software, simply, can't reach at the moment.

America's workforce problem is thus not necessarily that AI is eliminating jobs faster than people can find them; it becomes a matter of scarcity in people who can actually fill essential jobs.

In the upcoming 10 to 15 years, the demand for young workers is going to "explode", leaving employers with a shortage of qualified workers, according to Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota and the creator of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, the world's largest and most widely used population database.

This will become a snowball effect, where more people will leave the workforce than enter it for the first time in U.S. economic history.

The working-age population is shrinking along with the pipeline of future workers. And immigration, a key source of labor-force growth, is also declining in recent years.

Together, these trends are squeezing the U.S. labor pool, putting growth, competitiveness and fiscal stability at risk.

America needs a two-track workforce strategy: build tomorrow's talent while putting today's talent to work.

The political solution is much harder than the economic one

While economic concerns are rather straightforward, politics are not. Immigration remains one of the most polarized issues in American life, and the country hasn't passed comprehensive immigration reform since 1986.

Currently, with bipartisan efforts in Congress, the Dignity Act has 35 sponsors and is resulting in a narrow reform that has still taken years to mobilize. It looks to tighten border security, reform asylum, and create a multi-year legal status program for long-term undocumented residents, illustrating the problem rather than solving it.

Employers cannot build workforce strategy around uncertain legislation that may or may not pass, all the while demographic math isn't waiting on Congress; people are getting older, technology is changing jobs, and people are seeking new horizons.

Starting in 2025, the U.S. likely recorded negative net migration for the first time in at least half a century, per a Brookings analysis of the calendar year, with Census data, which measures July-to-June years, projecting in January that net migration would drop to about 321,000 for the year ending June 2026 and trend towards negative territory.

Yet, immigration has driven roughly half of U.S. labor force growth since 1995, and nearly all of it in recent years, because native-born working-age population growth has stalled.

That's the tension at the center of this moment: the U.S. needs workers precisely when immigration has become politically harder to expand. Employers who need to hire this year, in agriculture, construction, hospitality, healthcare and manufacturing, have to work inside the system as it exists, not the one Congress might eventually build. Policy reform is the long game, after all.

An immigration pathway employers are overlooking

The standard H-1B is what most employers picture when they hear "work visa": 65,000 new visas each year, plus another 20,000 reserved for workers with a U.S. master's degree or higher, and far more applicants than slots. Because demand outstrips supply, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) runs a lottery, whereby employers file a petition and then wait to see if their candidate is even eligible to be considered, with no guarantee either way.

What gets far less attention is that not every H-1B petition goes through that lottery at all. Universities, their affiliated nonprofit entities, and nonprofit or government research organizations are cap-exempt by statute, meaning their H-1B petitions can be filed and approved year-round, without competing in the annual cap.

It's a meaningful share of the program: in fiscal year 2024, USCIS approved roughly 141,000 new cap-exempt H-1B workers, more than double the 65,000 figure most people associate with the program, precisely because cap-exempt petitions aren't counted against the cap.

Employers rarely have this pathway on their radar for two reasons. First, most hiring managers only encounter H-1B through the lottery cycle and never look past it. Second, cap-exempt status is often tied to the institution, not just the job—a role affiliated with a qualifying university or research nonprofit can be cap-exempt even when the position itself isn't inside the university walls, for instance.

That gap is already showing up as a competitive advantage. "The companies carving out those pathways right now, whether through cap-exempt visa structures or other creative routes, are already gaining a real recruiting edge," said Danielle Goldman, CEO and co-founder of Build Talent Labs, a company that runs immigration programs to help U.S. employers hire global talent.

"But most mid-market companies haven't caught up yet," she added to International Business Times.

The U.S. doesn't need to invent a new system before it can begin addressing the labor shortage; Goldman argues it needs to use the infrastructure that's already available.

Filling jobs today, training workers for tomorrow

The Build Fellowship aims to take a different approach to skilled immigration. Under the model, a highly skilled immigrant first fills an urgent gap in the U.S. workforce, then uses their expertise to teach an in-demand skill part-time at an American college.

The idea is to address two problems at once: filling jobs that need workers today and preparing the newer generations for the industries that will be needed tomorrow.

In practice, it all really depends on who participates and where their expertise is needed. Many fellows come from specialized industries, fill specific workforce gaps, and teach skills related to their professional experience at participating colleges. Students may gain exposure to fields where employers are struggling to find qualified workers, creating a direct link between industry needs and higher education.

"It can be any specialty occupation that would qualify for a traditional H-1B. We've had Fellows in fields from machine learning, to geophysics, to zoology. The common thread isn't the field; it's deep expertise that's valuable both to a U.S. company and to students learning that discipline," Goldman said.

However, the potential of the fellowship also comes with limits. A program that combines immigration with workforce training is heavily reliant on how many skilled immigrants can participate, how many students each fellow can reach and whether employers and colleges are willing and able to support the model.

Goldman stressed that Build's Fellows have already "trained 6,000 students while continuing to contribute in the private sector and support the U.S. economy." But the scale of the broader U.S. labor shortage makes it difficult for any single program to provide a complete solution.

Part of the challenge may be that employers are still unfamiliar with the immigration pathway that makes the model possible. According to Goldman, few companies realize that concurrent employment exists, which allows a foreign national to hold multiple H-1Bs at the same time.

Under the Fellowship's structure, a professional can work part-time with a university-affiliated nonprofit while holding a full-time position at a U.S. company. "There isn't a catch to the model," Goldman said, describing concurrent H-1B employment as "an established part of the law for more than two decades".

Still, the premise points to a larger question: if America faces both immediate shortages and long-term gaps in its workforce, does it have to choose between attracting skilled immigrants and training American workers?

"There's a reason Congress kept these institutions out of the lottery," Goldman said, pointing to the role of universities, hospitals, nonprofits and research institutions in developing specialized expertise.

In the Fellowship's case, that expertise is then brought into the classroom, where immigrants can train U.S. students in their specialized field while continuing to contribute to the private sector.

If America needs both workers and the skills to train them, the most overlooked resource may be the expertise it is already bringing in.