Filling the rural labor shortage void

A hotly contested issue for the 2024 presidential election was immigration. President Trump’s presidential campaign centered around mass deportations, restricting entry for refugees and asylum, and expanding the border wall. Former Vice President Harris tried to neutralize the immigration topic:

But her message fell flat, as voters across the country doubted her resolve, associated her with the Biden administration’s failures at the border or were simply won over by Mr. Trump’s starkly xenophobic rhetoric.

Most of Trump’s political comments around immigration were concerned with the fact that immigrants were “stealing” jobs from U.S. citizens. However, labor economists pushed back against his sentiments by explaining how immigrants are beneficial to the labor market and the economy:

Immigrants take jobs but they also create new ones by spending in local economies and by starting businesses, economists said. One 2020 research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found immigrants are 80% more likely to become entrepreneurs than native workers.

A recent “surge” of immigrants to the U.S. is expected to add $8.9 trillion (or 3.2%) to the nation’s GDP over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan scorekeeper for Congress.

Currently, the manufacturing and agriculture sectors are experiencing labor shortages, especially with the declining rural population. The solution to address the labor shortage is to look to immigration, specifically increasing opportunities for employment-based visas for skilled and unskilled workers.

The largest immigration raid in U.S. history in Postville, Iowa can inform us about the importance of the immigrant workforce and the impact of I.C.E. raids on the surrounding community. The Postville raid resulted in 389 arrests in a town with a population of about 2,500. However, more than 1,000 immigrants either fled the town or left to follow family members who were detained. As a result, the county lost seven percent of its workforce, and the factory soon after went bankrupt. A different company bought the factory and hired Somalian refugees and immigrants from the Pacific island of Palau to legally work at the factory.

Thus, the void left by the detained immigrants was filled by an immigrant workforce.

Immigrants not only fill labor shortages in rural America but also bring an entrepreneurial spirit. Immigrants are eighty percent more likely to start a business compared to native-born Americans. A law review article documented how Hispanics and Latinos own small businesses even in rural places:

But before I got to Morristown’s main street, I was shocked to see three tacquerias, a tortilleria, and a panaderia. I hadn’t seen signs in Spanish since I left Nevada and it felt a little surreal to see a traditional Mexican bakery on a main thoroughfare in a small town in East Tennessee.

As the country moves forward into an uncertain future, it becomes crucial that the conservations around labor shortages help change the current political rhetoric around immigration.

To read more about immigrants in rural America, see These boots were made for immigrants and Addressing the rural lawyer shortage has never been more important.