Caitlin Clark, the University of Iowa basketball player who has dazzled audiences with her long shooting range and preternatural scoring ability, is one of the sport’s biggest draws.

Tickets for its games were nearly 200 percent more expensive this season than last year, according to Vivid Seats, a ticket exchange and resale company. Fans routinely traveled hundreds of miles to catch a glimpse of her, queuing for hours for a tip and boosting the local economy.

Nearly 10 million people, a record, saw her play in last year’s championship game, a loss to the state of Louisiana. More than three million people tuned in this year as she set the career record for points scored by a Division I college basketball player.

As Ms. Clark prepares for her final NCAA tournament — No. 1 seed Iowa plays its first game Saturday — the excitement has reached a fever pitch. Some wonder whether Ms. Clark’s effect on the popularity of women’s sports and its economy will continue after her career at Iowa ends.

Viewers, thanks to media rights deals, and corporate sponsorships are the main sources of revenue for college and professional sports. In women’s sports, these have long lagged behind what men’s sports receive. In 2019, for example, women’s sports programming accounted for less than 6 percent of coverage on ESPN’s “SportsCenter,” according to one researcher. study.

But in recent years, women’s sports have seen significant growth. a November report from Deloitte predicted that women’s sports would generate more than $1 billion in global revenue this year, about 300 percent more than the company’s 2021 estimate. Globally, sponsorships in women’s professional leagues will increase by 22 percent in 2023, compared to a 24 percent increase in men’s sports, according to SponsorUnited, which tracks corporate sponsorships and deals.

“You need women like Caitlin Clark, who are so amazing you can’t miss them,” said Michael Pachter, technical analyst at Wedbush Securities.

Stars make sports. The 1979 men’s national title game between Magic Johnson’s Michigan State and Larry Bird’s Indiana State remains the most watched college basketball game of all time. Both stars went on to join the National Basketball Association, making the league more popular than ever before.

Before the Johnson-Bird NBA era, the league’s finals were broadcast on tape delay. Today, the NBA makes billions of dollars from its television deals, and star players earn more than $60 million per season.

And as TV networks have tried to give viewers reasons to tune in during the streaming era, the rights to broadcast popular men’s sports like football, hockey and basketball have become expensive. That has prompted networks to make deals to broadcast sports, such as women’s basketball, that don’t cost as much and are expected to grow viewership.

“The networks have run into an economic problem where they are paying too much for the sports they need to fill their network space,” said Andrew Barrett, managing director of STS Capital Partners who works in sports management. “You start watching women’s sports because that’s what people watch.”

In January, the NCAA signed a deal with ESPN that valued the annual rights to broadcast the women’s basketball tournament at more than $60 million, more than ten times what the network paid in the previous deal in 2011.

The network pays $25 million to $33 million a year to broadcast some Women’s National Basketball Association games, while Scripps reportedly pays $13 million per year. The WNBA’s previous deal exclusively with ESPN was signed in 2013 for $12 million per year. Sports business magazine. Annual revenue has nearly doubled from $100 million in 2019 to about $200 million in 2023, according to Bloomberg.

“We are not a charity,” WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert said during a recent panel discussion with law firm Kramer Levin. “We are a true sports media and entertainment company.”

When Ms. Clark said she would forgo her senior year of college to enter this spring’s WNBA draft, the effect was immediate. The Indiana Fever, who are expected to select her with the No. 1 overall pick in April, saw a more than 200 percent increase in the average price of their season opener, according to Vivid Seats.

Ms. Clark’s success follows decades of progress for women in sports, dating back to the 1972 passage of Title IX, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions and has led to skyrocketing funding for — and participation in — women’s sports . The World Cup won by the US women’s soccer team in 1999 sparked interest and investment at the youth level. Serena Williams changed the audience for tennis, and athletes like race car driver Danica Patrick and fighter Ronda Rousey brought new viewers to their sport.

Andrew Zimbalist, professor of economics at Smith College, said Ms Clark’s success was “another event in a long line of events” that had increased acceptance of all women’s sports.

“There has been a positive evolution since Title IX was passed in 1972,” Mr. Zimbalist said.

Unlike previous generations, Ms. Clark has been able to immediately reap the benefits of her fame due to a 2021 change in NCAA rules that allows college athletes to profit from their own name, image and likeness, including through product endorsements and sponsorship deals. Ms. Clark’s sponsorship deals – estimated at $3 million, according to To3, a site that tracks NIL deals, means she makes more than most WNBA players. (Her projected base salary for her rookie season is $76,000.)

Ms. Clark is hardly the first female basketball star to generate intense interest. The WNBA was founded largely due to the popularity of women’s basketball. Renowned programs such as the University of Tennessee and the University of Connecticut collected multiple championships and featured stars such as Tamika Catchings, Chamique Holdsclaw, Candace Parker, Rebecca Lobo, Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi.

But progress comes in fits and starts. In 1997, the WNBA’s first season, average attendance was about 10,000. Three years later, the league expanded to 16 teams. In 2023 there were only 12 teams and the average attendance was less than 7,000. The 2023 finals averaged 728,000 viewers, an improvement on 2022, but lower than the 2003 finals, which were watched by an average of 848,000 viewers.

Mr. Pachter said he did not think the audience for women’s basketball would reach hundreds of millions overnight. But he sees interest continuing to grow steadily and can imagine a future where a streaming service could try to own exclusive rights to a league like the WNBA. For that to happen, other stars have to reach Ms. Clark’s level.

“You need three or four more, but they’re coming,” Mr. Pachter said. “They will emerge because we are paying attention now.”

In his budget this week, President Biden set major economic battle lines with former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The proposal offers the nation a glimpse of the divergent directions that pension programs, taxes, trade and energy policies could take depending on the outcome of the November election.

Over the past three years, Mr. Biden has passed major pieces of legislation aimed at strengthening the green energy economy, making investments in infrastructure and strengthening America’s domestic supply chain with subsidies for microchips, solar technology and electric vehicles. Few of these priorities are shared by Mr. Trump, who has promised to cut more taxes and erect new trade barriers if he is re-elected.

The turning point will come when the economy enters the final stretch of what economists now expect to be a ‘soft landing’ after two years of high inflation. However, the prospect of a second Trump administration has added uncertainty to the economic outlook, as businesses and policymakers around the world brace for what could be a dramatic shift in the United States’ economic stewardship.

Here are some of the most striking differences in the two presidential candidates’ economic policies.

Sparring about the social safety net

At first glance, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump appear to have similar views on the country’s social safety net programs. In 2016, Mr. Trump broke with his fellow Republicans and refused to support cuts to Social Security or Medicare. Mr. Biden has long urged that the programs must be protected and has taken aim at Republicans who have proposed cutting or scaling back the programs.

In his budget proposal on Monday, Mr. Biden reiterated his commitment to preserving the nation’s rights system. He called for new efforts to improve the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, including by making wealthy Americans pay more into the health care program. However, his plans contained few details on how to ensure the long-term sustainability of either program.

Separately on Monday, Mr Trump appeared to suggest he was open to entitlement cuts. He said on CNBC that there is “a lot you can do in terms of rights, in terms of cuts and also in terms of theft and poor management of rights, massively poor management of rights.”

The Trump campaign made it clear that the former president was referring to reducing waste, but the Biden campaign seized on this comment. It fast released an advertisement comparing Mr. Trump’s comments to Mr. Biden’s pledge at the State of the Union to stop anyone who tries to cut Social Security or Medicare or raise the retirement age.

Although Trump never signed cuts to Social Security or Medicare as president, he has flirted with the idea before. Asked about entitlement cuts in a CNBC interview in 2020, he said: “At the right time we will look at that.”

To tax or not to tax?

One of the biggest contrasts between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump centers on who — if anyone — should pay more taxes.

The president this week proposed more than $5 trillion in tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, including a new 25 percent minimum tax on the richest Americans and an increase in the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent.

Mr. Biden combined his proposed tax increases on the wealthy with tax cuts for the middle class. He called for an expansion of the child tax credit, which many Republicans have opposed, which would expand income tax eligibility and provide new tax breaks aimed at making housing more affordable for first-time buyers.

Mr. Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which included nearly $2 trillion in tax cuts, much of which benefited corporations and the wealthy. Many of those tax cuts expire in 2025, meaning whoever becomes president will have a major say in whether they are extended or allowed to expire.

Biden wants to roll back much of the 2017 law, except for parts that benefit taxpayers making less than $400,000.

Mr. Trump has provided few details about his tax plans, but suggested at a meeting in February that he envisioned a new round of spending cuts.

“You’re all going to get the biggest tax cuts as we make additional cuts and create a brand new Trump economic boom like you’ve never seen before,” Mr. Trump said.

I spoke to CNBC on MondayMr Trump said it would be “very bad for this country” if Trump’s tax cuts were not extended.

The Friend Shorer vs. the Fare Man

Although Democrats and Republicans have become more polarized in recent years, trade policy is one of the few areas where views appear to have converged.

For all their differences, Mr. Biden has left the trade agenda handed to him largely intact by Mr. Trump. Tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese imports that Mr. Trump has imposed have yet to be reversed, Mr. Biden has stepped up scrutiny of Chinese investment in the United States and U.S. investment in China, and the administration’s industrial policy -Biden has disrupted relations with some European countries.

If re-elected, Biden is likely to continue his policy of deepening trade ties with U.S. allies — a policy called “friendshoring” — and reducing supply chain dependence on adversaries such as China. The Biden administration is expected to complete a review of China’s tariffs in coming months and could cut some duties on consumer products and increase others, further protecting the fast-growing U.S. electric vehicle sector.

Mr. Trump has indicated he is gearing up for a new round of trade wars. The former president and self-proclaimed ‘Tariff Man’ has spoken of imposing a 10 percent tariff on all imports in a second term and a tariff of 60 percent or more on Chinese goods.

Clash on clean energy

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 has become Mr. Biden’s signature piece of legislation, and its future — and the trajectory of U.S. climate policy — depends on who wins the election.

Mr. Biden’s economic team is busy rolling out regulations tied to tax and climate legislation to anchor investments in clean energy and the electric vehicle supply chain in the economy. The Biden administration hopes the law will prove sustainable because many of these investments are being made in states led by Republicans.

However, Mr. Trump, who has long derided electric vehicles as too expensive, underpowered and a threat to American jobs, should not be counted on to embrace much of the law if elected.

“We are a nation whose leaders demand all electric cars, despite the fact that they don’t go far, cost too much and whose batteries are produced in China,” Trump said. a meeting in New Hampshire in January.

It is also unlikely that the former president, who withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord, will prioritize other clean energy investments.

For years, Mr. Trump has argued that solar energy is ineffective and that wind turbines are responsible for the slaughter of birds.

President Biden used his State of the Union address Thursday to remind Americans of his efforts to guide the nation’s economy out of a pandemic recession and to lay the groundwork for a second term aimed at making the economy by increasing taxes on businesses and corporations. the wealthy while taking steps to lower costs for the middle class.

Mr. Biden introduced a series of policies aimed squarely at the middle class, including efforts to make housing more affordable for first-time homebuyers. The president used his speech to try to differentiate his economic proposals from those of Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump. Those proposals largely focused on cutting taxes, rolling back the Biden administration’s investments in clean energy and gutting the Internal Revenue Service.

Many of Biden’s policy proposals require action from Congress and depend on Democrats gaining control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. However, the president also unveiled plans to direct federal agencies to use their powers to lower costs on expensive items like housing, at a time when the lingering effects of inflation continue to weigh on economic sentiment.

From taxes and housing to inflation and consumer protection, Mr. Biden had his eye on pocketbook issues.

Raising taxes on the rich

Many of the tax cuts that Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017 are set to expire next year, making tax policy among the most critical issues on the ballot this year.

On Thursday night, Biden built on many of the tax proposals he has promoted over the past three years, calling on big corporations and the wealthiest Americans to pay more. He proposed raising a new minimum tax on corporations from 15 to 21 percent and proposed a new 25 percent minimum tax rate for billionaires, which he said would raise $500 billion over ten years.

Mr. Biden criticized the cost of the 2017 tax cuts, asking, “Do you really think the rich and big corporations need another $2 trillion in tax breaks?”

Help for the housing market

High interest rates have made housing unaffordable for many Americans, and Mr. Biden called for a mix of measures to help ease those costs. That included tax breaks and mortgage assistance for first-time homebuyers and new incentives to encourage the construction and renovation of affordable housing.

Mr. Biden called on Congress to make certain first-time buyers eligible for a $10,000 credit, and to make some “first-generation” homebuyers eligible for up to $25,000 as a down payment.

The president also unveiled new subsidies and incentives to encourage the construction of affordable housing. He also said the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would pursue new rules to address the “competitive” closing costs that lenders impose on buyers and sellers, and called for greater oversight of landlords who collude to raise rents and include hidden fees in leases to stop.

Protecting consumers against “shrinkflation”

There is only so much a president can do to curb rapid inflation, but Mr. Biden used his comments to take aim at his favorite new bogeyman: contraction inflation.

“Same size bag, put fewer chips in it,” Mr. Biden said. He called on lawmakers to pass legislation to end the corporate practice of reducing the size of products without lowering their price tag.

The president also touted his efforts to reduce late credit card fees and “junk” fees and to eliminate surprise fees for online ticket sales, claiming he saved Americans billions of dollars through various forms of price gouging.

American building and buying

One of the mysteries preoccupying Mr. Biden’s advisers is why he is not getting enough credit for key pieces of legislation passed in the past three years.

The president moved through these achievements, reminding his audience of the construction of new roads and bridges and investments in microchip development and clean energy production.

Biden went off script and chided Republicans for voting against some of those policies while reaping the benefits of investments in their states.

Tackling China

As president, Mr. Biden has prioritized stabilizing America’s economic relationship with China while seeking to reduce the United States’ dependence on Chinese products. Mr. Biden took aim at Mr. Trump, saying that while the former president portrayed himself as tough on China, the Biden administration’s policies had a bigger impact on narrowing the bilateral trade deficit and boosting U.S. economic growth.

The president added that his administration stood against China’s unfair trade practices and kept the export of sensitive U.S. technology away from the Chinese military. He said Republicans who say the U.S. is going after China were wrong.

“America is rising,” Biden said. “We have the best economy in the world.”

Beijing was abuzz with politics on Tuesday. China’s annual legislative gathering — the National People’s Congress, where Communist Party leaders promote their solutions to national ills — opened for business.

The event is a chance for leaders to set the direction of the economy and outline how and where the government will spend money in the coming year.

But while they aimed high, they offered little. Officials indicated they were not ready for dramatic steps to revive an economy ravaged by a real estate crisis, loss of consumer confidence and financial pressure from indebted local governments. Despite their reluctance to spend, China’s top leaders expect the economy to grow by about 5 percent this year.

The growth target and other policies were laid out in a report presented to the annual session of the Legislature. It was presented by China’s No. 2 official, Li Qiang, and is the culmination of a weeklong meeting dominated by officials and party loyalists.

Everyone agrees: the objective is ambitious.

There was one word that economists universally used to describe China’s 5 percent growth target: ambitious.

That would never have been the case. For decades, the Chinese economy has been synonymous with much higher growth, sometimes even double digits. But three years of strict pandemic restrictions took their toll, and a deepening real estate crisis has led to the collapse of dozens of developers. With insufficient action from Chinese leaders, some experts are now skeptical that China will achieve 5 percent growth this year.

“It’s not surprisingly an unrealistic set of targets,” said Logan Wright, director of China Market Research at Rhodium Group, a firm that specializes in China research.

It was still possible that the housing crisis would ease this year, Mr. Wright said, “but the policy measures outlined here won’t have much to do with it.”

Wait, no bazooka?

Some people believed – or at least hoped – that Tuesday’s reports would show that China is willing to take bigger steps to revive the economy, such as bailing out local governments, rescuing the real estate companies that haven’t collapsed, or by distributing alms to households. to stimulate spending.

Instead, the government said it would make a similar amount available as last year in the form of special bonds for local governments. No new measures for the real estate market were proposed and only the need to increase consumer confidence was discussed.

“They could have done more and the support could have been greater,” said Tao Wang, chief China economist at UBS. “They need greater explicit support from the central government,” she said.

Not only economists were disappointed. Investors who hoped China would bring in the big guns were also disappointed. In Hong Kong, where foreign investors can bet on China’s biggest companies, the Hang Seng Index fell 2.6 percent.

“Anyone looking for the policy bazooka will be disappointed,” said Andrew Polk, co-founder of Trivium China, a research and consulting firm. “But,” he added, “that die was cast some time ago.”

When it comes to the military, there is money to spend.

China’s top leaders outlined plans to expand military spending by 7.2 percent to about $231 billion by 2024. The percentage increase was the same as last year and continued a decades-long expansion of Chinese military spending, now the second largest in the world after the United States.

China’s spending on warships, fighter jets and other weapons is largely about projecting power in Asia, including by tightening the country’s grip on the disputed South China Sea and threatening Taiwan, the self-governing island democracy that Beijing says is his territory.

In his report to the legislature, Mr. Li reiterated China’s long-standing warning against “separatist activities aimed at ‘Taiwan independence,’” adding that Beijing would be “resolute in advancing the cause of the reunification of China.”

Mr. Li’s vague comments reflect how China’s leaders are waiting for Taiwan’s newly elected President Lai Ching-te to take office in May before considering major steps, including more military operations around the island, Ou Si-fu said. a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a Taipei think tank under Taiwan’s Ministry of Defense.

But China’s continued heavy spending on its military showed that Xi Jinping would continue to fight for potential conflict, if only to show Washington that it was serious about asserting its interests.

“Since the relationship with the United States is not good, China naturally cannot show too much weakness,” Ou said.

Come join us. Sorry, the press conference has been cancelled.

China invited journalists from all over the world and handed out visas that in most cases have become difficult to obtain. For many foreign correspondents, this year’s National People’s Congress marked the first time since the pandemic that the Chinese government allowed them to enter China to report.

Yet the party also made an abrupt change in the way it would communicate at the conference. On Monday it said it was scrapping a long-standing tradition: the prime minister’s press conference. It was one of the few opportunities for journalists to communicate with top officials. The decision to abolish the press conference, announced on the eve of the legislative conclave, was seen by many as another step away from transparency.

China’s top leaders set an ambitious growth target on Tuesday as the Chinese economy suffers from a steep housing market decline, consumer slump and investor caution.

Premier Li Qiang, the country’s No. 2 official after Xi Jinping, said in his report to the annual session of the legislature that the government would aim for economic growth of about 5 percent. That’s the same goal China’s leaders set last year, when official statistics showed the country’s gross domestic product growing 5.2 percent.

Some economists question whether growth was as high as China claims. Furthermore, last year brought a modest recovery as strict ‘zero Covid’ measures were in place until December 2022. Achieving the same growth this year, without the benefits of that recovery, could be much more difficult.

Consumers and investors were skeptical about the prospects for a sustainable recovery. Stock markets in China fell heavily in January and early February before recovering over the past four weeks as the government took steps to encourage stock buying. But Mr Li claimed China was on the right track.

China had “resisted external pressure and overcome internal hardships,” Mr Li told the National People’s Congress, a Communist Party-controlled body that approves laws and budgets. “Overall, the economy is recovering.”

The National People’s Congress, a week-long choreographed event, typically focuses on the government’s short-term initiatives, especially economic goals. China’s growth target and the ways in which the government is trying to achieve it are under intense international scrutiny this year.

Communist Party leaders are trying to restore confidence in China’s long-term prospects and leverage new growth engines such as clean energy and electric vehicles. Mr Li’s report also flagged new spending on artificial intelligence and “improving cutting-edge and frontier technology research”, according to Xinhua.

But those efforts could be held back by a tangle of problems surrounding the housing sector: a glut of apartments, indebted real estate companies and local governments, and homebuyers reluctant to put money into real estate as values ​​fall.

It may be difficult to achieve China’s growth target this year without another big round of debt-fueled government spending. Achieving annual growth of around 5 percent “will require decisive, comprehensive and coordinated policy support,” HSBC economists said on Friday.

Vivian Wang contributed reporting from Beijing.

The U.S. economic recovery from the pandemic has been stronger and more durable than many experts expected, and a rebound in immigration is a major reason.

A resumption of visa processing in 2021 and 2022 has boosted employment, allowing foreign-born workers fill some gaps in the workforce that persisted across all industries and locations after the pandemic shutdown. Immigrants also meet a longer-term need: replenishing the labor force, a key to meeting labor demand as birth rates decline and older people retire.

Net migration in the year ending July 1, 2023, reached its highest level since 2017. The foreign-born now stands at 18.6 percent of the workforce, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that immigration will prevent the number of working Americans from declining over the next decade. Balancing job seekers and opportunities is also critical to moderating wage inflation keep prices under control.

International instability, economic crises, war and natural disasters have led to a new flow of refugees that could help close the crisis. still increased gap between the demand for labor and job candidates. But that potential economic dividend must contend with the inflammatory politics, logistical hurdles and administrative backlogs the wave has created.

Visits to Texas Thursday by President Biden and his likely election opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, highlight the political tensions. Mr. Biden is trying to deal with a border situation that he recently called “chaos,” and Mr. Trump has vowed to close the door after record numbers crossed the border under the Biden administration.

Since the start of fiscal year 2022, about 116,000 have done so arrived as refugees, a status that comes with a federally funded resettlement network and immediate eligibility for work. A few hundred thousand others who arrived from Ukraine and Afghanistan are entitled to similar benefits.

But there have been many more – about 5.5 million arrested at the border and at airports and seaports. Not everyone is allowed to stay, but a large majority of those who do receive little government support. People seeking asylum have faced long delays before they can legally work, and a busing campaign by southern governors has concentrated them in a few cities that are struggling to absorb them.

The need for workers is often greatest elsewhere. Steve Snyder, business agent for Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 157 in Lafayette, Indiana, and president of the city council, says his union is desperate for new members, especially given the new infrastructure work available in the region.

“I would welcome them with open arms, put them in a hotel and do my very best to get them involved in our community because that is what we need,” Mr. Snyder said. “It’s going to be expensive, it’s going to be uncomfortable, but it’s something that, in my opinion, needs to be done.”

Immigrants have previously revitalized shrinking towns and cities. Anuj Gupta runs the Welcoming Center, a Philadelphia nonprofit founded 20 years ago in an effort to stem population decline by attracting immigrants. “This should be as bipartisan an issue as an issue can be in 2024, because the economy demands it, employers want it, and the people coming are looking for work,” Mr. Gupta said.

The Biden administration acted to get migrants into the workforce by expanding Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans who were in the United States before July 31, 2023, a move that affected 472,000 people. It has also expanded its use humanitarian parole for people from countries in turmoil, including Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua; the designation typically lasts two years and requires applicants to have a financial sponsor in the United States.

People in those categories are immediately eligible for a work permit, but must still be processed. The asylum process offers the prospect of legal work, but requires a waiting period of at least six months after applying for asylum. In 2022 it is lasted an average of nine months to process one of those permits.

State and local governments in New York And Illinois was put into high gear at the end of last year to get the paperwork moving. Agencies began hosting massive document processing events to get people into the pipeline, hiring scholarships for those who made it through. Median processing times for work permits for asylum seekers and parolees is now less than a month.

As a result, the number of work permits granted to people seeking or having been granted asylum, refugees and those under temporary protected status and parole increased from approximately 423,000 in 2022 to over 1.2 million in 2023. data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

But filling out the paperwork is still a major bottleneck. The number of adults crossing the border continues to exceed the number of work permit applications submitted. They are difficult for non-English speakers to complete without legal assistance, which is in short supply, and often require fees and a consistent mailing address.

Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York have helped thousands of people with work permit paperwork. It also trains immigrants for specific tasks, such as nannies, and offers safety training needed for construction work.

One of the beneficiaries was Edgar Alayón.

Mr. Alayón, 32, was an accountant in Venezuela before losing his job for not supporting the Venezuelan government. He arrived in the United States in May and Texas offered free flights to New York, where, he had heard, the city would provide shelter.

Mr. Alayón was granted parole, but he did not work until receiving his work permit in December. That allowed him to take up jobs in construction and rent a small room in an apartment.

But he only gets a few days of work a week, and his work permit is only valid until May 2025. His goal is to get a green card, which would free him from the fear of possible deportation and give him time to return to his former profession.

“God willing, I have to work on it, I will get my residency,” Mr. Alayón said through a translator. “It would be an honor to be a citizen of this city and the United States, which offers us so many opportunities.”

But New York City isn’t the best place to look for work. The unemployment rate is 5.4 percent, significantly above the national average. Many positions typically occupied by immigrants, such as those in hotels and restaurants, never fully recovered from the pandemic. That has forced people to look for jobs like food delivery, with low barriers to entry but high competition.

And the push for work permits for the newest arrivals has stirred some resentment among the millions of undocumented immigrants who still don’t have access to legal work permits.

“You have to make sure you don’t pit them against each other,” said James Parrott, director of economic and fiscal policy at the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs. “I think over time it will be a positive thing and they will be integrated, but in the short term it is very disruptive and people shouldn’t be blasé about it.”

Dr. Parrott said it would help if state governments facilitated the move to smaller cities, where more housing is available than in the big cities where buses from Texas have been unloading. Some migrants have found their way to other places, often with the help of a free bus ticket, but it is not always clear what resources and opportunities await them.

Even for those who have found permanent employment, work permits are a temporary solution, while asylum courts remain inundated with applications that now take years to assess, exposing applicants to continued uncertainty.

Yusuf Ali Sendil’s experience offers a glimpse into what the future could look like for millions of newcomers with limited permission to remain in the United States.

Dr. Sendil, a psychiatric researcher from Turkey, said he lost his job in 2017 for political reasons. He received a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University on a research visa and later applied for asylum. Long lead times for an initial work permit forced him to postpone his start as a medical assistant at Rutgers.

Because the permit only lasts for two years, he has already applied for an extension. But although the first work permits are now coming quickly and for some categories over the last five yearsextensions often last sixteen months, according to federal data.

That means Dr. Sendil could face another period without a work permit, which is potentially disruptive for his patients and could derail his career.

“If I don’t get it on time, I’ll lose my job, and if I don’t finish my residency, I won’t be able to apply,” says Dr. Sendil, a member of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, which represents hundreds of organizations. thousands of people in similar situations. “All my colleagues are planning a position after their residency, but I really can’t do that because I don’t know what will happen.”

Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, a Soviet prime minister who in 1990 bore the brunt of the economic chaos that engulfed the final years of communist rule and led to the country’s political collapse and the end of the Cold War, has died . He was 94.

His death was confirmed on Wednesday by Valentina Matvienko, the head of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper chamber of parliament, in a statement on Telegram.

Starting as a welder in a factory in the Urals, Mr. Ryzhkov rose as a party loyalist with economic expertise to peaks of success as a protégé of the Soviet Union’s last leader. Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The Communist Party’s general secretary, Mr. Gorbachev, appointed Mr. Ryzhkov in 1985 as chairman of the Council of Ministers – a title more commonly known as prime minister – to the second most powerful post in the Soviet hierarchy.

For millions of citizens, Mr. Ryzhkov was a figure of guidance and compassion at the scenes of two disasters: the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident in 1986, where he ordered the evacuation of a 30-kilometer radius contaminated with radioactivity, and the 1988 earthquake that killed 25,000 people in Soviet Armenia, where he coordinated relief efforts and comforted survivors.

It was also Mr. Ryzhkov’s job, along with Mr. Gorbachev and other senior officials, to share responsibility for a national economy ravaged by the costs of a long arms race with the West and teetering on disaster after seven decades of corruption and mismanagement under a series of successive governments. of dictators.

The task was urgent. There were shortages of food and fuel, as well as clothing, housing, medical aid, and other economic necessities for the 286 million people living across the vast expanse of the fifteen Soviet republics. Mr Ryzhkov and Mr Gorbachev understood the problem and were acutely aware that the solution lay in a move towards a Western-style market economy.

In a speech to a Communist Party congress in Moscow in 1986, Mr. Ryzhkov put the matter forthrightly. “Of all the dangers,” he said, “red tape is the greatest. Creating the appearance of work. Hiding behind empty rhetoric. Bureaucracy can hold back the improvement of the economic mechanism, dampen independence and initiative, and create barriers to innovation.”

He spoke of the need for “radical reforms” and “deep restructuring”, saying prices needed to be more closely linked to production costs and consumer demand, and incentives for workers improved. “To put it plainly,” he said, “the urgent need to improve the control system was in many ways underestimated until recently.”

Mr Gorbachev agreed with these objectives. But from his point of view, the most important questions were how quickly to implement change, and how to successfully introduce it to a people unaccustomed to free markets.

The road ahead for Mr. Gorbachev was strewn with obstacles: republics with an independent spirit; local officials and factory managers protect their prerogatives; farmers who prefer to hoard their harvests rather than sell them; and bureaucrats who fear changes that could expose their comfortable intransigence and cost them their jobs.

By 1990, the need for action was acute and the political landscape had changed. Most of the fifteen republics, whose economic problems had become more serious, rushed to implement free-market reforms, while the national government became increasingly concerned about giving up its powerful central economic control.

Under increasing pressure to act, Mr. Ryzhkov unveiled a proposed package of changes in May 1990 that would combine a small dose of free market liberalization with continued heavy government regulation. It stalled on the systemic transformation that many experts believed was necessary to stem the worsening economic crisis in the Soviet Union.

Amid growing lines at markets and shortages of food — especially potatoes, a national staple — demonstrators began appearing outside the Kremlin and demanding Mr. Ryzhkov’s resignation. The protests soon spread to other cities. Warning that the country was descending into chaos, Mr. Gorbachev in July dropped Mr. Ryzhkov from the Communist Party’s policy-setting Politburo.

In September, Mr. Gorbachev announced a plan to abolish the communist economic monolith and install a free market economy within 500 days. Prices were to be gradually freed from state control, industries were to be denationalized, farms and businesses were to be sold or rented as private property, and job guarantees were to be abolished in favor of a labor market.

Boris N. YeltsinThe President of the Russian Republic backed Gorbachev’s 500-day plan and pushed for even stronger measures, including a banking and stock exchange system and greater autonomy for the politically troubled republics.

Mr. Ryzhkov still favored a slower, more cautious withdrawal from central control as a more prudent path toward free markets. He wanted stricter controls on real estate prices and ownership, and warned of mass job displacement if free-market proposals were passed too quickly. But it was too late for such arguments. The Soviet Union was already disintegrating due to coups and uprisings in the republics.

In his book “Gorbachev: His Life and Times” (2017), historian William Taubman said tensions boiled over in a tumultuous confrontation between Mr. Ryzhkov and Mr. Gorbachev after a Yeltsin deputy rudely demanded that Mr. Ryzhkov would resign.

“If I have to leave,” Mr. Ryzhkov shouted, “so should everyone else. We all contributed to the collapse, the bloodshed, the economic chaos. We are all responsible. Why should I be the only scapegoat?” And he warned Mr Gorbachev: “Go ahead. Manage the government yourself! Then the next blow will be against you.”

Western analysts said Gorbachev needed someone to blame for the economic chaos of the late 1980s and the coming disruptions in market reforms. In November 1990, he created a new power structure in which he would rule together with the leaders of the republics. There was no place in the new plan for Mr. Ryzhkov. Kremlin observers said this marked his forced retirement.

A month later, Mr. Ryzhkov had a heart attack. During his recovery, on January 14, 1991, he resigned as Chairman of the Council of Ministers and was succeeded by Valentin Pavlov, another of Gorbachev’s protégés, who took the new title of Prime Minister.

In the spring, a resilient Mr Ryzhkov sought a return to power. The Communist Party wanted a strong candidate for the elections for the presidency of the Russian Federation and chose Mr Ryzhkov to face Mr Yeltsin, the heavily favored candidate of Democratic Russia’s reform movement. Mr. Ryzhkov won only 17 percent of the vote, conceding to Mr. Yeltsin.

On December 25, 1991, Mr. Gorbachev resigned as the eighth and final leader of the Soviet Union. He declared his office extinct and handed over his powers to Mr. Yeltsin. The next day, the Soviet Union was dissolved in favor of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a self-governing assembly of former Soviet republics.

Nikolai Ivanovich Ryzhkov was born on September 28, 1929 in Dzerzhynsk, Ukraine. Little is known about his family background. He attended the Technical School of Mechanical Engineering in Kramatorsk and worked as a shop inspector, railway section head and mine foreman.

He joined the Communist Party in 1956 and graduated from the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) in 1959. He started as a welder at the nearby Uralmash heavy machinery factory and slowly rose through the ranks. In 1965 he became chief engineer, then deputy factory manager and in 1970 factory director.

In 1975 he was transferred to Moscow as first deputy at the Ministry of Heavy and Transport Machine Construction, in 1979 he was appointed first deputy chairman of the State Planning Committee of the USSR, and two years later he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In 1982, he was promoted to the party’s secretariat to head its economic department.

Mr. Ryzhkov’s main patron was Yuri V. Andropov, the general secretary of the Communist Party and Mr. Gorbachev’s mentor.

When Mr. Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985, he appointed Mr. Ryzhkov to full Politburo membership before appointing him prime minister, replacing the 80-year-old Nikolai A. Tikhonov, left behind by a remnant of the Kremlin’s gerontocracy by the former Soviet leader. Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Mr. Ryzhkov quickly aligned himself with Gorbachev’s economic policies. But to the public he was most visible on television responding to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, when he evacuated 336,000 people threatened with radioactivity, and to the earthquake in Armenia, when he hugged sobbing survivors and berated officials for incompetence.

Mr. Ryzhkov was married to Lyudmila Sergeyevna Ryzhkova. They had a daughter, Marina.

After his years in government, Mr. Ryzhkov disappeared into Russia’s left-wing old guard, eventually leading a small communist faction in parliament called Power to the People. He was a frequent critic of Yeltsin and others as they pursued their quasi-capitalist ambitions.