Immigrants important to filling jobs left open during the pandemic

For the past three years, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, I have heard people lament the lack of employees in every business from bars to restaurants to hospitals to meat packing plants.

Right after they get through bemoaning everything no longer available because of employee shortages, they segue into how there's plenty of able-bodied people out there who just refuse to work because they'd rather sit on their butts receiving government handouts.

That scenario would be easier to fix than the reality, as reported in "3 reasons why the US labor shortage may never be solved" by Juliana Kaplan in the Dec. 16, 2022, Insider blog.

Three situations converged about the time of the 2020 pandemic that changed the entire work force reality.  With the onset of the pandemic,  2.5 million people retired, 1.5 million of them early, so instead of a million people retiring, over twice that number did.  Then an estimated 400,000 people in the work force died because of COVID-19.  Add to this that the Trump administration of 2017-2020 reducing the number of immigrants allowed into the United States, which meant a lot fewer people were coming into this country to pick up the slack.

"Everybody says there's not enough people," the blog reiterates.

Unfortunately there's too many people so afraid of immigrants that they still repeat the old white nationalist mantra of immigrants taking away  jobs from American worker, even though many of the jobs in questions — working in meat packing plants and poultry processing plants, busing tables in restaurants and  milking cows on large farms — were not on the top of many American workers' list.  In fact, even before the pandemic, more than one local employer was recruiting workers in Mexico because not enough Americans applied.

There are people so afraid of more immigrants entering this country that 11 states are looking to roll back child labor laws to allow children as young as 14 to work at such jobs as serving alcohol in bars and restaurants, to work longer hours on school nights and to work hazardous jobs now banned by child labor laws.  According to "Kids could fill these shortages, even in bars, if these lawmakers succeed" in a May 25, 2023, Associated Press article by Harm Venhulzen, some lawmakers see the answer as opening up these jobs to under-age minors now protected by child labor laws.     

But as Reid Makip, director of the Child  Labor Coalition which advocates against exploitive labor policies, "You can't balance a perceived labor shortage on the backs of teen workers."

There's a better solution and it's being recommended by many experts — returning to earlier immigration levels that would allow more legal immigrants to enter this country.  Immigration was cut back during the Trump administration just before the pandemic, according to the May 1, 2023, editorial, "Worker shortage cure: immigration" in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and in Minnesota dropped from 9,317 in 2019 to 4,042 in 2021. It had been as high as 17,000 in 2015, and this was before the retirement and COVID-19 deaths the past few years.

Nor are things expected to change in the labor market. According to the same editorial, 22.5 percent of Minnesota's labor force is baby boomers nearing retirement. Who will replace them? Not all those purported unemployed welfare recipients; our state's unemployment is at a record low 2.3 percent and nationally it's 3.4 percent, the lowest it's been in 54 years.

We need a new source of workers and the logical answer would be to allow more immigrants into the United States, just as this country did at other times when we needed laborers.  Thin back to who built the railroads and worked in the meat packing plants and steel mills and coal mines; it was immigrants.

While today's immigrants are likely to come from Central America, Mexico, India and China, like past immigrants they will be fleeing violence, poverty and natural disasters and looking for a better life for themselves and their children.  Like those earlier immigrants, they will be despised for being immigrants and will be expected to start at the bottom.  It's the American way.

For those still suspicious of immigrants, remember that unless you are an indigenous person,  you are the descendent of immigrants yourself and have no complaining rights.  Our ancestors came here for the same reasons as today's immigrants.  Now it's not only the morally  right thing to allow new immigrants that same opportunity but the only thing that makes sense in our economy.

This is the opinion of Times Writers Group member Lois Thielen, a dairy farmer who lives near Grey Eagle. Her column is published the first Sunday of the month.