If you drive through rural Iowa on a Tuesday morning, you’ll see “help wanted” signs in almost every store window. This includes the diner, the feed store, and the factory on the edge of town. At that factory, three shifts are now back to work for the first time since the pandemic began. And the boss will tell you in a low voice that he still needs more people. He doesn’t care. We only need workers for him.
That’s the truth at the heart of the labor crisis in rural America. There are jobs out there. There is a real need. And the workforce isn’t, plain and simple.
Iowa is a good spot to see how this plays out. In December 2019, there were about 60,000 job openings in the state, but 49,000 people were out of work. By the beginning of 2022, there were 109,000 job openings and 59,500 people who were out of work. The math doesn’t make sense. For years, it hasn’t worked. In these same communities, though, political talk quickly turns hostile when someone points out the obvious answer.
It had already dropped to 2.5% in the spring of 2022 in a rural Iowa county with about 33,000 people. That’s right—the county would still be short over 800 workers even if every person on unemployment were given a job tomorrow. A local owner of a construction company said they were full until next spring. There is plenty of work. Not enough people are willing to be honest about where the workers could come from.
This part makes me feel bad. About 73% of farmworkers in the United States are immigrants. There aren’t enough workers in construction, food service, transportation, and warehouses, which are also the industries that need foreign workers the most. And it just so happens that the countries that send the most people to the US are ones where farming is common. Workers from Mexico, India, the Philippines, and El Salvador already know what it’s like to do hard physical work when they get there. People who have fled Burma, Bhutan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo come from places where more than half of the people who work farm. It’s not like these people need to be persuaded to show up at 5 a.m. It is hard not to see the irony. If you take rural manufacturing leaders away from the microphone, they will sometimes say this in public and sometimes in private that they want immigration reform. They have a good grasp of economics. But in many of these same communities, the political energy is going the opposite way—away from freedom and toward suspicion—because people think that outsiders are a threat to a way of life that is, ironically, already going away because fewer people are moving there.
The politics at the border don’t help. Arguments about the security of the southern border get in the way of immigration reform, and those arguments don’t seem to be meant to solve anything. One expert on immigration policy put it bluntly: a number of Republican border plans would basically push people away from legal ways to come to the U.S. and into the hands of people smugglers. That’s not guarding the border. That’s chaos dressing up as policy.
At the same time, rural America is getting smaller. People who are younger move to metro areas. Schools join together. The tax base shrinks. Too few people work in the factories, too.
Somewhere in all of this is a reasonable fear: the old worry that immigrants will take jobs from native workers. But economists who study this find that in rural areas, things are always the opposite. A lot of immigrants take jobs that no one else wants. It’s not because immigrants swooped in and filled these roles; they were already empty. This is because of language barriers, hard work conditions, and physical demands.
A wall or a waiting list are not what rural America needs. It needs people who are ready to work. And millions of people all over the world, including those who have been forced to move or are struggling, want that chance. It looks like the match should be pretty clear. That may be why it keeps being ignored.
