Unemployment in this country remains as historically-low levels.  You can't drive down a commercial street without seeing signs that say: "We're hiring."  Plenty of jobs go unfilled.  I understand that the wages for some of those jobs aren't what they should be, but that is a different issue.  The reality is that we need more workers.
           The second reality is that, if we don't have enough workers in this country, the only solution is workers from outside the country.  That's simple logic. How we handle that is another question, on which reasonable people could and do disagree, but the fact that we need to allow more workers into the country is inescapable.
           The same reality is true in the Church, as it was in Jesus' time.  We do not have enough ordained workers-- priests and deacons-- and we don't have enough consecrated women, and we don't have enough lay workers.  As Jesus says, we are to "ask the master of the harvest (ie, God) to send out laborers for his harvest."
             Increasingly God answers that prayer with workers born somewhere else.  We all experience the reality of foreign-born priests in our parishes, sometimes with English-language abilities which aren't perfect.  We make accommodations, understanding that if we had to go to India, for example, and speak one of the languages spoken there, we would be far worse.
            But the foreign-born priests are only a fraction of the workers we need to grow God's kingdom.  Do you ever wonder if the people we're trying so hard to keep out of our country might be some of the people God is sending us to be workers in the harvest?  They want to come here; there are jobs for them here; and we need them in the Church here as well.
             Jesus sent workers even to the folks the Jews hated-- the Samaritans (see Lk 9:52).  Paul won the battle in the early Church over whether followers of Christ needed to be Jews, persuading the leaders that Jesus' call was to everyone, Jew and Gentile alike.  Race, ethnicity, national origin simply didn't matter.  There was a need for workers in the harvest.
             Maybe God is sending us the workers we need not just in the secular sense but also in the religious sense, and we simply refuse to let them in, resulting in a great shortage.  Maybe we need to get past anti-immigrant bias and nativism for the Church to prosper.  Narrow-mindedness would have killed the early Church, and we have always been an immigrant community  (look at the Irish and the Italians from the 19th century).
             We need workers.  Why do we keep turning them away?