North Dakota
Can immigrants solve North Dakota’s labor shortage?
BISMARCK — North Dakota’s job opportunities are exponentially outpacing its population. With an unemployment rate under 3% — the third-lowest in the nation, according to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics
— the state is looking to legal immigrant workers to cushion industry demands.
Government and industry leaders gathered Wednesday during the first-ever Global Talent Summit to strategize ways to integrate international laborers into North Dakota’s workforce and social fabric.
Hosted by the Office of Legal Immigration (OLI), the all-day summit featured breakout sessions and keynote speakers including Lt. Gov. Tammy Miller and Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-ND.
“We have used immigration to solve our workforce challenges throughout the history of our great state,” Miller said in the opening remarks.
She went on to talk about the difficulties immigrants face working seasonal jobs through temporary visas.
“So many of these farm workers would love to stay in the state of North Dakota full time. They love our state and they would love to bring their families here. So why not?”
Peyton Haug Forum News Service
OLI was created within the state Department of Commerce in response to a 2023 bipartisan
bill
that aims to specifically aid businesses experiencing the statewide labor shortage. Its function is to organize efforts that recruit and retain immigrant labor while analyzing factors in North Dakota’s decreasing workforce.
That includes the May
2024 report
that the OLI produced in collaboration with consulting firms
Dalberg
and Labor Mobility Partnerships, who had representatives attending the summit.
“Correlation, as they say, doesn’t mean causation,” Joe Dougherty of Dalberg said.
He was pointing to a graph from the report that told the story of North Dakota’s economic growth over the past two decades.
“But you can see you’re hitting a ceiling and the binding constraint that’s forming that ceiling is the labor shortage.”
According to the report, North Dakota has the second-lowest unemployment rate in the nation at less than 3%. Meanwhile, the number of job openings increased by 50% between 2018 and 2023 — many of which were concentrated in rural areas of the state.
The state’s
online job service
lists over 13,000 jobs available, but Miller said that number is closer to over 30,000 considering the volume behind some of the individual jobs posted. Spokesperson Mike Nowatzki confirmed that number on behalf of the governor’s office after the summit.
Another major conclusion drawn from the report, and the driver of the summit, is that North Dakota needs to better market itself as a place to live and work. It revealed that immigration to North Dakota has slowed dramatically over the last century.
In 1915, nearly 80% of all state residents were immigrants or children of immigrants, whereas now, just 4.9% were born outside of the country, according to the report.
Armstrong provided the summit’s closing remarks, placing a heavy emphasis on the need to reform immigration policies. He said filling open jobs with foreign laborers would be much easier if there was more collaboration between both sides of the political aisle.
“Quit making the legal immigration system, as broken as it is, harder to interact with, because that is what’s happening,” Armstrong said. “It shouldn’t matter where they’re from, and it shouldn’t matter the color of their skin, shouldn’t matter what religion they practice, as long as they’re interested in being here and doing the work and contributing to the state and contributing to the community, and that’s what a rational, reasonable immigration policy should look like.”
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North Dakota
Employers learn about international recruitment and employing foreign-born labor at summit
![Employers learn about international recruitment and employing foreign-born labor at summit Employers learn about international recruitment and employing foreign-born labor at summit](https://gray-kfyr-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/L7M7HQZUBNGNRN4Z6PCP3IB4BM.jpeg?auth=95551dba578c356ab9d9c1f7961bf92a8b5db72e6f42722c1c911eea4c639fc2&width=1200&height=600&smart=true)
BISMARCK, N.D. (KFYR) – Reports say North Dakota has more jobs available than we are able to fill. That was the topic on Wednesday at the Office of Legal Immigration’s global talent summit.
Workforce Development Director Katie Howe said this is a challenge the state has been working to address for years. She said North Dakota is making great strides and has more workers today than five years ago, but we need more.
Howe said the state’s unemployment rate is among the lowest in the nation, having invested in strategies to retain talent. Plus, she said the new Office of Legal Immigration means the state is able to attract talent from other countries in a way they weren’t able to do a year ago.
“The Office of Legal Immigration’s current scope of work includes sourcing national and international recruitment pipelines, improving employer awareness of those pathways and recruitment opportunities, and improving the retention of international talent within the state,” said Howe.
Howe said in just one year, the Office of Legal Immigration has become an immigration resource hub for employers and communities across North Dakota. She said if an employer has used workforce immigration in the past or is just looking to get started, their office is a great place to begin.
Copyright 2024 KFYR. All rights reserved.
North Dakota
During the hottest summer on record, Forum editors accused the government of dishing out fake news
![During the hottest summer on record, Forum editors accused the government of dishing out fake news During the hottest summer on record, Forum editors accused the government of dishing out fake news](https://cdn.forumcomm.com/dims4/default/eac6c19/2147483647/strip/true/crop/550x367+0+0/resize/1598x1066!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fforum-communications-production-web.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fbrightspot%2Ff7%2Ff2%2F238c4a744f489c635bf256b5e2e2%2Fdownload.png)
BISMARCK — In early August of 1936, Americans must have been worried about North Dakota.
A striking photograph, accompanied by a dramatic headline and caption depicting a bleak and apocalyptic scene, appeared in hundreds of newspapers nationwide.
The Marlow Review via Newspapers.com
“Drought cattle invade capitol grounds,” the headline read.
BISMARCK, N.D. — Hungry cattle whose rangelands are now barren dust-covered plains, finally invaded the North Dakota capitol grounds here last week, nibbling at such spares grasses as had survived the scorching heat with gripped the state this week.
Readers had reason to be worried. The summer of 1936 was a scorcher. It is still the hottest summer on record in North Dakota with an average temperature of 74°F from June to August. On July 6, 1936, Steele, North Dakota, recorded a temperature of 121°F, the highest temperature ever recorded in the state.
The photo of the cows invading the capitol provided ample evidence that the Great Depression, combined with serious drought conditions, made life tough for many on the Great Plains.
Forum archives
However, a couple of weeks after the photo was published, the public learned that they shouldn’t believe everything they see.
This time, newspapers republished the cow photo but with a new headline.
“It’s a fake! But scores of newspapers bit on this N.D. picture.”
So the cows weren’t grazing at the Capitol or were they? Was it a hoax?
The answer isn’t that simple: creating a figurative dust-up between the U.S. government and The Fargo Forum. But how did it all begin?
After the 1929 stock market crash, America dove headfirst into the Great Depression, which caused widespread economic hardship for Americans everywhere, from the biggest cities to the smallest towns.
Prairie states, including North Dakota, were particularly hard hit, not just by financial troubles but by Mother Nature herself. Years of low rainfall and poor farming practices led to severe dust storms, which eroded topsoil, ruined crops, and led to widespread farm failures.
Many families chose to leave their farms in search of a better life. This exodus contributed to a sense of despair and instability in the region.
Contributed/Library of Congress
It became known as “The Dirty ‘30s” across the Great Plains.
President Franklin Roosevelt sought to help struggling farmers and rural communities by establishing the Resettlement Administration (RA) on April 30, 1935, as part of his New Deal.
Former Columbia economics professor and Undersecretary of Agriculture Rexford Guy Tugwell was chosen to lead the new agency.
Contributed/NDSU Archives
In a report written by late University of North Dakota history professor D. Jerome Tweton for the State Historical Society of North Dakota, Tweton said the agency was charged with long-range planning that emphasized rural rehabilitation.
“The RA and Tugwell focused on the ‘little farmer’ – those who were deeply in debt, who worked submarginal land, who were destitute. The RA was the social planner’s delight, for it meant advising people where and how to live,” Tweton wrote.
The RA’s resettlement concept, which emphasized relocating farmers away from the Great Plains, became highly controversial. According to Tweton, Tugwell knew the agency’s ideas and hardships from the Great Depression/Dirty ‘30s had to be translated into terms that a regular person could understand.
“The problems that confronted ‘the little farmer’ had to be documented in such a way as to create a sympathetic public,” Tweton wrote.
Contributed/Library of Congress
Therefore, Tugwell prioritized public information. RA writers began producing creatively written newspaper stories, radio scripts, speeches, and magazine articles. In addition to hiring writers, the agency hired some of the nation’s top photographers to take photos of “real life” in parts of rural America.
Tweton said more than 272,000 of their slice-of-life photographs were taken from 1935 through 1942. (In 1937, the Resettlement Administration became the Farm Security Administration, which continued the public information campaign).
Six photographers shot photos in North Dakota, including scenes of dusty fields, life on the farm and in one-room schoolhouses.
This is where the ‘cows at the capitol’ photo comes in.
‘A definite and damaging fake’
It all began in late July or early August when someone from the RA took a photo of the cows at the Capitol. Times Wide World Photos then sold the photo to the syndication service Publishers Autocaster Service.
The problem was that it wasn’t clear that the photo had been taken by a government agency that had a stake in the message conveyed in it. Critics said it was a propaganda photo distributed to sway people toward the RA message about hardship on the plains.
There was no way a paper in New York, California or Texas would suspect the photo wasn’t wholly what it seemed. The photo was a misrepresentation, according to The Forum, which wrote on August 19, 1936:
“If those cows could only read–they’d think they’d been eating loco weed. (The photo) gave an indication that they were practically breaking down the doors. “
In fact, cows from a nearby farm had been known to cross the border of the capitol grounds, and guards simply shooed them away.
The Forum wrote: “That this picture, innocent in itself, should go out of Washington with descriptive matter distorting its whole significance was, the Fargo Forum believes, a definite and damaging fake.”
Contributed/Still shot from “The Plow that Broke the Plains.”
The Forum was ready for a fight. The editors pointed out that the cows at the Capitol photo wasn’t the first time the agency pulled the wool over the eyes of the reading public.
Another photo taken in Pennington County, South Dakota, of a bleached-out old steer skull resting on the cracked and parched ground became famous for its powerful portrayal of the desolate farmland on the prairie.
After taking the initial photo, the photographer admitted to moving the skull to other locations, including a grassy field, to get a different angles.
When the photos were released to newspapers, The Forum cried “foul” accusing the photographer of staging the photos — a big no-no in photojournalism.
The photos were also used in a government-produced documentary called “The Plow that Broke the Plains.”
The fight hit extra close to home when Roosevelt and Tugwell flew to North Dakota on Aug. 27 to assess the drought damage in the state. Tweton said issues of The Forum greeted them on the train with a front-page story featuring the skull photo with the caption “A Wooden Nickel” (an expression used to convey something worthless.)
The photographer, Arthur Rothstein, later countered by saying, “The paper was strongly anti-administration and local pride had been wounded.”
The Forum fought back by warning members of the president’s party not to be taken in by “unreliable stories” of the drought in North Dakota.
Contributed/Library of Congress
The dust-up seemed to be over by September 12 when Forum editors wrote: “With the thought that its essential purpose has been accomplished, the Fargo Forum today folds the book on its exposé of faked stories and phony pictures of the drought.”
Tugwell and his photographers were ready to move on as well. By 1938, Rothstein, who took the infamous ‘skull’ photo, for some reason, convinced the agency that he should return to the area to take “positive pictures.”
One such photo was taken by him at the Great Northern Depot in Fargo in 1939. The image, which shows a man smiling as he pushes a cart, was meant to convey America’s progress in transportation and a vibrant Fargo community.
Contributed/Library of Congress
It seems The Forum and the government had made nice.
This period in history taught lessons. In the coming years, photo syndicators created more stringent standards for identifying the source of photos, and credits were required upon publication.
The Forum
Hi, I’m Tracy Briggs. Thanks for reading my column! I love going “Back Then” every week with stories about interesting people, places and things from our past. Check out a few below. If you have an idea for a story, email me at tracy.briggs@forumcomm.com.
North Dakota
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