HELP WANTED
For those of you who don’t know, Columbia County, New York (which is referenced in this column) is located in the upper Hudson Valley, about 40 miles south of Albany.
No matter where you go in Columbia County, you see the same sign: “Help Wanted.” Everyone seems to be looking for help. From restaurants on Hudson’s Warren Street to farms in Kinderhook, workers, particularly low-wage workers, are in short supply. So, it should be no surprise that the unemployment rate is low. It’s low all over the country: 3.7% in October. The real surprise was Columbia County: 1.9% for the same month. No wonder the signs are all over. Anyone who wants a job can find one. It may not be the job of your dreams or one on which you can support a family, but it’s a job.
In fact, Columbia County’s unemployment rate is the lowest in New York State and, as far as I can tell, the lowest it’s ever been. Over the past 22 years, it reached a high of 8.8% in February 2010 in the wake of the sub-prime and bond market collapse and has been in an uneven slide down since then (except for the effects of the pandemic in April 2020 when it reached 12.4% before quickly tumbling back to earth).
Why? There are some obvious answers. There isn’t a big enough population to meet the demand, a problem perhaps exacerbated by some having opted out of the job market in this semi-post-pandemic period. The county has not been losing population, at least not lately. From 2010 until 2019, the population steadily decreased from 63,035 to 59,582. But between 2019 and 2021, the population increased to 61,778. One can presume that the decline results from the usual suspects, an aging population, some of the best and brightest people leaving after school, and the profits to be made from increasing land and home values. And I presume the increase is primarily related to people who fled the pandemic in New York City.
But only rarely in media stories about unemployment these days do I hear mention of the effects of immigration or, rather, the lack of it. The number of people actually entering the country at the southern border has more or less declined since 1998, perhaps as deportations and preventive measures at the border ramped up. This was true in the Obama years and exploded in the Trump years when minimum wage workers, many of them illegal aliens a/k/a undocumented people (pick your own term), began visibly disappearing from restaurants, farms, and other businesses. The increase in the county’s population over the past two years didn’t include people looking for those kinds of jobs, and many weren’t looking for jobs at all (at least not in the county). In fact, many were looking to hire those kinds of workers themselves. (Have you tried to find a gardener or handyman recently?)
Beyond that, the country’s not growing fast enough to replace itself. The declining birthrate, reminiscent of Europe for many years, equates to fewer consumers and employees in the long run. Before we got so hysterical about immigration in America, immigrants fueled population and consumer growth. Businesses have been trying to make up for the reduction in the workforce by increasing automation at all levels. Shopping seems to be an increasingly remote experience. I don’t have to go into a McDonald’s or even the local Bagel Tyme to place an order. There are plenty of stores and supermarkets where you can order online. Manufacturing, too, is increasingly automated. But the ready availability of jobs in restaurants and on farms just shows that automation can’t make up for everything, at least not yet.
Low-wage workers are not the only problem. Because of our hostility to immigration, we’ve deprived ourselves of many high-achieving foreign students who would, in the past, have stayed in the US and worked their way into prominent positions in industry and academia. Have you checked out the names of people leading companies, and not just tech companies? They come from places that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago, and these are people who are leading the way in many innovative firms and even old-line industries.
It’s hard for me to come up with a rational reason it’s been virtually impossible to arrive at an immigration policy that makes sense. The last serious attempt was during Bush 43’s administration, but increasingly anti-immigrant Republicans quashed it. Obama’s attempt to at least deal with dreamers by executive order was waylaid by Trump. These days the whole subject seems nothing more than a political football driven by the extremes in both political parties, and no one seems to care much about the collateral damage to both asylum seekers and America’s economy. Today, there are a couple of senators (at least one Republican and one Democrat) supposedly trying to work out a bipartisan agreement regarding the dreamers and border security. If they’re able to get anywhere, it’ll be better than nothing, and I’ll applaud their efforts. But considering our history as a nation of immigrants, is that really the best we can do?
All of you who have displayed HELP WANTED signs ought to talk to your new congressman. After all, he belongs to the party that is opposed to immigration. Change can only happen one person, one representative, at a time. And business owners ought to be the impetus for that change:
Help Wanted. NOW.