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?”

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.”