The Midwest cities in search of new migrants

The Midwest cities in search of new migrants
(from the Financial Times, Tue., Aug. 27)

On a tree-lined street in St Louis, a post-industrial Midwestern city whose population has been shrinking for decades, a bold project is under way to reverse the region's deteriorating demographics.

Immigration continues to divide politicians in Washington and causes severe social strains in big cities and the southwestern states that are bearing the brunt of a post-pandemic influx of migrants. But in cities such as St Louis in Missouri, it is seen as part of the solution to labour shortages and years of depopulation.

This may be the first year [in decades] that we'll have net zero decline in population," says Arrey Obenson, president of the International Institute, a non-profit that has been reaching out to recent arrivals in larger cities to draw them to the Midwest. The programme is on track to bring about 2,000 immigrants by the end of the year, to a city that saw an outflow of about 4,400 residents last year. All of the migrants are authorised to work in the US.

One of them is Ruben Leon, an IT technician from Venezuela. "I see my future in St Louis," says the 35-year-old, who moved to the city without knowing anyone. He says his initial concerns about St Louis's reputation for crime now feel overblown, and he hopes to eventually bring his eight-month-old daughter to join him.

Through the International Institute's work in St Louis, Missouri stands out in both its method and ambition - Obenson's vision is to bring 15,000 people to the region by 2030 with other partners. It is not alone in regarding current and future waves of migration as an opportunity to bolster local workforces and revitalise shrinking communities.

Polls show that a majority of Americans want immigration to be reduced. But like many developed countries, the US is confronting an ageing society and facing long-term population decline. That has prompted some states and municipalities, even in Republican strongholds such as Missouri, to deviate from the wider anti-immigration sentiment. They are motivated by on-the-ground realities: not enough workers and not enough taxpayers.

In Kansas, employers including fast-food chain Chick-fil-A and snack maker Frito-Lay are struggling to fill jobs in food service, manufacturing and retail. They have partnered with non-profits to hire recently arrived refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine.

In North Dakota, a Republican-led state where the unemployment rate is half the national average, a bipartisan bill last year created a unit dedicated to helping businesses recruit and retain foreign-born labour, including those granted asylum in the US. Its purpose, according to Governor Doug Burgum, was to alleviate the state's "extreme workforce shortage".

The Republican governors of Indiana and Utah used an opinion piece in The Washington Post last year to argue that states should be able to sponsor immigrant arrivals to ease chronic labour shortages.

"The standstill [in Congress] on immigration hobbles both parties and, more seriously, endangers America's long-term wellbeing," they wrote, adding that the country's border can "remain an embarrassment, or it can become a big asset to us once again".

Reforming the US immigration system appears a forlorn prospect. Federal lawmakers have not passed a comprehensive piece of legislation on the issue since 1990, when the US economy was less than a quarter its current size.

Under the Biden administration, border crossings from Mexico into states such as Texas and Arizona reached historic highs, leading to a long and bitter stand-off between Democrats and Republicans in Congress, while a global humanitarian crisis continues to push thousands to seek asylum at the southern border. Immigration is set to remain a hot-button topic in November's presidential election.

Amid the increasingly rancorous debate, demands from businesses in sectors from dairy farming to healthcare to expand legal pathways and increase visas by businesses have often fallen on deaf ears.

Last year, more than 100 businesses and trade groups urged Congressional leaders to shorten the six-month period asylum seekers must wait before they can apply for a work permit - a crucial barrier to hiring and financial self-sufficiency for migrants. But efforts to pass legislation are yet to achieve success.

This lack of progress has created a "policy vacuum" that presidents are forced to work within, according to Tara Watson, an economist at the Brookings Institution think-tank. Rules change from one administration to the next, something she says makes for "really bad policy".

"Immigrants don't know what to expect, the American people don't know what to expect," she says, adding that with an ageing populace going into retirement, immigration is essential to growing the US labour force.

The logjam also forces local organisations and governments to improvise with only limited federal support. In many cases, they must bear most of the short-term costs of supporting immigrants themselves.

In St Louis, the International Institute relies wholly on private benefactors for its outreach programme, funding that helps pay for benefits like the first few months of housing for new arrivals - a way to avoid adding to the city's homeless population but which is a significant bottleneck in its operations.

Without private funding, it can be impossible to resettle immigrants. Top City Promise, a refugee resettlement agency based in Kansas state capital Topeka, says it wants to relocate migrants for job placements and provide the same housing, food and transportation assistance on arrival that it does to recently arrived refugees. But director Yana Ross says it lacked the funds to relocate a Venezuelan family that recently applied to its programme.

"If you're allowing the families to come into the United States, giving them the right tools to become a contributor to society and be able to provide for themselves is extremely important," says Ross. "When you don't, you . . . create a pathway towards homelessness."

Migrants who are not considered refugees are ineligible for the same level of federal funding as those whose claims of persecution have been verified, and Ross says that supporting a family through the 90-day transition period costs between $5,000 and $10,000.

Recruiting recent arrivals also happens without co-ordination between officials in St Louis and whichever city they are leaving, though the International Institute communicates regularly with the local government. Instead, Karlos Ramirez, director of its Latino outreach programme, travels around the country promoting St Louis at shelters. Over the past year, he has travelled to Boston, Denver, New York City, as well as cities in California and Texas.

But even among immigrant communities, it is not easy to persuade people to move to the Midwest from a big city like New York, where there are larger immigrant networks, more job opportunities and more robust public transport networks.

"You stand a chance of owning a home here," says Obenson, explaining how his organisation sells St Louis to immigrants in other cities. "The cost of living here, compared to most of the country, is quite affordable."

For Leon, who moved to St Louis in March after seeing a flyer at a shelter in Chicago, the idea of low-cost living resonated. He is working at airport caterer Gate Gourmet but dreams of running his own business installing security cameras and other networking equipment.

But the non-profit's Afghan outreach programme, which targets those who fled after the US's chaotic withdrawal from the war-torn country in 2021, has relocated only 317 Afghans to St Louis despite targeting more than 10,000 at events since 2022.

Programme director Moji Sidiqi says that once families have registered their children in schools and picked up several jobs, they are less willing to move to another city.

On the other side, businesses see potential in the International Institute's outreach programme. According to the International Institute, 91 different employers have reached out this year to fill 107 positions.

An exodus of families has emptied out some St Louis city neighbourhoods and made it increasingly difficult to fill roles, says Andy Karandzieff, who co-owns restaurant and chocolate shop Crown Candy Kitchen. "We just don't have the bodies here any more."

Karandzieff and his wife, Sherri, have tried to hire a line cook for a year without success. He says he would be "very open" to hiring immigrants brought in by the International Institute.

The potential language barrier is not a concern, he adds, explaining that Crown Candy Kitchen already has two deaf dishwashers.

"They get the job done, they've all learnt - it's great."

St Louis lies more than 1,000 miles from the US border with Mexico, but the debate over immigration will still loom large over Missouri's gubernatorial election in November.

Before his defeat in the Republican primary, candidate Bill Eigel pledged to arrest and deport all migrants in the state. Lieutenant-governor Mike Kehoe, who won the nomination, has peppered the interstate highway between St Louis and Kansas City with billboards demanding that America's southern border be secured.

In Kansas City, where in April the Democratic mayor Quinton Lucas announced he was in contact with the mayors of New York and Denver to potentially bring in migrants with work permits, the political fallout was immediate. Republican rivals described the plans as "beyond ridiculous" and accused him of "importing lawlessness".

"We don't have anything to report on right now," said the mayor's press secretary, when asked for updates on migrant resettlement since the mayor's initial comments.

The broader controversy around immigration, especially the alarmist rhetoric around "illegal immigrants", has meant that many in favour of even modest pro-immigration initiatives are sensitive to how their work is framed. In North Dakota, the recently created government unit was purposefully termed the Office of Legal Immigration.

"We do have to be careful," says Ramirez of the International Institute, acknowledging Missouri's right-leaning bent. The non-profit has strategically focused on resettling only those with work permits and social security numbers in part to attract less criticism, he says.

Cities and local organisations also have to be careful not to overextend local resources, especially housing. Unlike New York City, Kansas City does not have dedicated shelters for migrants. That has strained some local non-profit groups that provide housing assistance and legal services, which have been left to accommodate an uptick in asylum seekers this year.

Even when political sensitivities are absent, businesses willing to support immigrant and refugee workers can face myriad challenges, including language barriers and transport issues in car-dependent American cities.

In 2022, Berry Global, a manufacturing company that produces plastic cups and containers for McDonald's, Starbucks and others, began recruiting refugees - such as Maksym Shapovalov, who fled war in his native Ukraine - at its plant in Lawrence, Kansas, in response to a labour shortage sparked by Covid-19 and business expansion.

The new workers have lower turnover and helped to address the pandemic-era labour crunch, according to the company. The plant of roughly 1,000 workers employs 97 refugees.

But Brian Good, director of the Lawrence plant, cautions that "it's not easy to get going - you have to have the right culture, built to be accepting of it". To support its new workforce, Berry Global has spent more than $1mn shuttling refugee workers the 45 minutes from Kansas City to Lawrence.

Still, despite the challenges, the plant director says the programme is going well. Refugees tend to bring more appreciation to the job than many native-born employees, Good says, adding that it's "awesome to know how much you're helping somebody start a new life in the country".

Other employers are less keen. According to Briana Taylor, who connects refugees with jobs at non-profit Della Lamb Community Services, job placement has been difficult this year as the labour market has slowed. Every spring in recent years, manufacturers have wanted as many entry-level workers as possible, she says. But this year, "they've had nothing".

"I think that people are starting to push back on non-English speakers," adds Taylor. "They claim it's a liability issue."

And while the International Institute has focused on those with work permits, many migrants have only legal status through a White House programme called "humanitarian parole", which admits certain people from countries such as Cuba and Venezuela for urgent humanitarian reasons. Unless that parole is renewed, many will still have to apply for asylum to remain in the US, a years-long process whose outcomes vary widely from state to state.

According to Syracuse University, an average of about 79 per cent of asylum cases heard in Kansas City in the year through July were denied. In contrast, 70 per cent of cases in New York were accepted.

Irrespective of which parties control Congress and the White House next year, some believe that the US will eventually have no choice but to push through comprehensive reform of its immigration system.

Watson, at the Brookings Institution, predicts that within a decade, it will be "extremely obvious" that the US does not have sufficient numbers of direct care workers or enough people of working age to fund retirement benefits for its elderly. "We're going to have some hard conversations about that," she says.

Ness Sandoval, a professor at Saint Louis University who has studied the city's population decline, is more blunt.

"The growth is going to come from immigrants," he says. "Regardless of where you're at politically, this demographic reality is coming."

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