Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Thursday, May 9th, 2024

Desperate for Workers but Dead Set Against Migrant Labor: The West Virginia Dilemma

Author:     Paul Kiernan
Source:     Microsoft Start
Publication Date:     8 May 2024
 Link: Desperate for Workers but Dead Set Against Migrant Labor: The West Virginia Dilemma
Stephan:  

West Virginia has never been a well-governed state. The population is poor, poorly educated, and getting more elderly because young people don’t stay in the state. It is the only state to see its population decline.  As this article describes all manner of hourly worker jobs now can not be filled and as a result all kinds of businesses are closing down all over the state. I lived in Shepherdstown a lovely college town in the Panhandle of West Virginia for several years. It is a beautiful state except where coal mining destroyed and polluted the environment, but except for a few places like Shepherdstown, it does not welcome new people, even those coming from other states, and certainly not immigrants. The state, I am afraid, has a rather grim future unless something changes, and since the older White people always vote for Republicans, I don’t see what that change might be. West Virginia is also an extreme example of something going on in Red States all over the country.

Desperate for Workers but Dead Set Against Migrant Labor: The West Virginia Dilemma. Credit: The Wall Street Journal

FRANKLIN, WEST VIRGINIA—Not many places need warm bodies more than this picturesque town in the Appalachian Mountains. There are so many elderly people and so few workers to take care of them that some old folks have died before getting off the wait list for home visits by health aides.

“We advertise all the time,” said Janice Lantz, the local senior center’s director. “We can’t hire a direct-care worker.”

West Virginia shares a demographic dilemma afflicting many parts of the country: an aging population and unfilled jobs. Decades of migration out of Appalachia have left West Virginia older, less educated and less able to work than other parts of the U.S. Its labor-force participation rate—the share of the 16-and-older population either working or looking for work—was 55.2% in March, the second-lowest in the country.

Some other states, including Maine, Indiana and Utah, have sought immigrants to shore up their workforces. But while West Virginia represents one extreme in its labor […]

Read the Full Article