Immigration reform is needed to expand the defense and shipbuilding industrial base and workforce to enable building submarines at a faster rate, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said Friday.
Kaine said the shipbuilding workforce is his biggest concern for the trilateral Australia-UK-U.S. AUKUS agreement to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines by the 2040s. The plan also includes U.S. sales of three to five Virginia-class submarines in the 2030s.
However, the submarine makers HII [HII] and General Dynamics’ [GD] Electric Boat are far below the Navy’s ideal rate of building and delivering two boats per year.
Kaine said the companies are currently at a rate of about 1.4 submarines per year.
“The biggest obstacle in Pillar 1 right now to meeting our pace of production is workforce issues,” Kaine, chairman of the Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee, said during a Center for a New American Security event on June 21.
AUKUS Pillar 1 refers to the main submarine plan whereas Pillar 2 relates to sharing other technologies.
He said when talking to Australian stakeholders about how they would build a nuclear-powered submarine operation and maintenance industrial base then a construction industry, “they grapple with workforce issues, too, and I think this is going to be the choke point, if we don’t recognize it, address it, and be innovative in solving it.”
Kaine lauded Australia’s willingness to invest $3 billion in the U.S. submarine industrial base as “pretty remarkable,” but said they will only be able to meet the need if the U.S. is “creative on the workforce.”
He said this has to include immigration reform to meet the workforce requirements.
Kaine noted while he is pushing a bill that would allow Pell grants to be used for career and technical education, “an awful lot” of what he hears from the industrial base is about workforce cannibalization.
“Like I’m going to hire your employee because next week, you’re going to hire mine. And sometimes that happens within a region, and sometimes that happens between shipbuilding regions. But the bottom line is, if we’re not increasing the net employment contribution in this industry, we’re not going to meet the obligations that we’ve made, even with dollars to invest,” he said.
Kaine said submarine investment funds have to be used to expand the employee base “and that is going to have to include immigration reform.”
“The U.S. birth rate is not growing, and even if it started growing tomorrow, we wouldn’t see it for 20 years. And so immigration reform is going to have to be part of it,” Kaine continued.
Kaine’s push for immigration reform follows Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, who consistently pushes for increases to legal immigration to improve the blue collar workforce in the submarine industrial base (Defense Daily, March 30, 2023).
The senator expressed optimism that the current economic conditions in the country could help push an immigration reform bill to address the growing workforce crisis.
“I’m actually heartened that you know, out of every challenge comes an opportunity, the super low unemployment rate, the tight labor market, some of the commitments that we’ve made in this space, I think is going to be the kind of crisis that opens the door for an immigration reform bill that’s very focused on workforce.”
He did not detail any specifics he sees about a likely immigration bill in the short term amid the upcoming fall 2024 federal elections.