Plain Talk: North Dakota’s oil industry wants refugees and immigrants to fill oil field jobs

MINOT, N.D. — Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine has displaced thousands and thousands of Ukrainians, most of whom want a spot to go.

In the meantime, North Dakota has a long-enduring workforce scarcity that’s felt most acutely within the state’s oil fields.

Now, these two issues are coming collectively to type what’s, if not an answer, is at the least a option to mitigate some struggling whereas concurrently creating some new alternatives.

Former Lt. Gov. Brent Sanford, who stepped down from Gov. Doug Burgum’s administration late final 12 months, is now the mission supervisor of what North Dakota’s oil business has dubbed Bakken GROW. The acronym stands for International Recruitment of Oilfield Staff, and it is exactly what it seems like. A concerted effort to match Ukranians, who want an escape from their homelands, with jobs in North Dakota’s oil business.

“It is not solely a workforce recruitment effort, it is a humanitarian effort too,” Sanford mentioned on this episode of Plain Discuss.

“The USA just isn’t good at authorized immigration,” he added, however hopes this program could make a distinction. He says it can start with Ukrainians — there’s already a large Ukrainian group in western North Dakota, and he says they’re reaching out to organizations just like the Ukrainian Catholic Church to assist with the trouble — however the hope is to focus on potential refugees and immigrants from different nations and ethnic backgrounds as properly.

Additionally, on this episode, state Rep. Corey Mock joined co-host Ben Hanson and me to speak concerning the ongoing debate over North Dakota’s public employee pension. We disagreed rather a lot, however we did discover some frequent floor round the concept that there are not any simple options to this mess, and that lots of the lawmakers in Bismarck on either side of the talk are ignoring some fairly brutal fiscal realities.

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