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

FRANKLIN, W.Va.—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 needs, it represents another in its resistance to immigration.

Since last year, Republican Gov. Jim Justice has signed legislation banning “sanctuary cities” in West Virginia and deployed that state’s own National Guard troops to the Mexican border in Texas. State lawmakers have introduced bills that would: require businesses to conduct additional screening for unauthorized workers; punish companies for transporting migrants who are deportable under U.S. law; create a program to enable state authorities to remove even some immigrants with legal status to work; and appropriate money for Texas to install more razor wire along the Rio Grande.

In a recent television ad, Moore Capito, a former Republican state legislator running to succeed Gov. Justice in November, enacted a scene in which he blocks a van of migrants from entering the state.

There is little evidence that many recent immigrants—either those who entered the country legally or those who didn’t—have had any inclination to go to West Virginia, the only state with fewer residents than it had in 1940. The portion of its population that is foreign-born is 1.8%, the lowest of any state.

Local business groups representing manufacturers, bankers, real-estate agents, builders and auto dealers are lobbying against the proposed worker-screening legislation, which they say would deter needed workers and create burdensome and duplicative requirements.

“We should avoid sending messages, either overtly or through our actions, that this is not a good place to come if you’re willing to work,” said Steve Roberts, president of the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce. The state doesn’t need only doctors and engineers, he said, but manual laborers to “do the work that some of us have just gotten too old to do.”

West Virginia’s elected officials say they aren’t opposed to immigrants who have entered the country legally, only those who haven’t. Lawmakers intent on preventing a feared influx of migrants say they are motivated by rule of law—and a desire to put West Virginians first.

The worker shortage is especially dire in sparsely populated Pendleton County, where Franklin is the county seat.

The dining room at Franklin’s Star Hotel & Restaurant, adorned with taxidermied creatures including a black bear and a bobcat, has had to stop serving breakfast on weekdays or opening on weekends. “We can’t find help anywhere,” said Felicia Kimble, whose family owns the place.

General contractor Jay Nesselrodt said he has to turn down work every week because he can’t hire enough workers. A recent Tuesday found him juggling emails, phone calls and a paint roller at the Fisher Mountain golf course, where he is renovating the clubhouse.

“I’m supposed to be managing people,” he said. “Instead, I’m painting.” So was his wife, a lawyer.

Nesselrodt said he has long relied on Latin American immigrants who drive in from northern Virginia to do most of the painting, drywall and tile work at his jobs. They were tied up that day. When his brother died two years ago, they came to the funeral. “They’re like family,” he said.

Later that evening, at the Pendleton County High School boys’ basketball game, the gray-haired spectators outnumbered the students. Declining enrollment has meant that for the school to field teams, many athletic students need to play football, basketball and baseball, said Athletic Director Jackee Propst.

Local historians said the state has long been wary of outsiders, not just from other countries but from other states. “West Virginians don’t want immigration—of any kind,” said Stephen Smoot, editor of the Pendleton Times newspaper. There is even antipathy toward “come-heres” from nearby metropolitan areas who move in and look down their noses at locals, Smoot said.

Voters picked “Wild and Wonderful” as the state official slogan in 2007. Wildlife officials have reintroduced elk, locally extinct for more than a century. For many residents who fish, hunt or simply seek solitude in the hills and hollows, fewer humans is a plus.

“There’s a quality of life that comes from living in a sparsely populated area,” said Smoot. “You don’t have the irritations of constant human contact.”

National issue

Many of the migrants who have streamed over the nation’s southern border recently have been granted permission to work. Those who enter the country illegally often turn themselves in to federal authorities and request asylum, and some get permission to work while waiting for their claims to be adjudicated. In addition, the Biden administration has made many migrants who entered illegally, including roughly 470,000 Venezuelans last year, eligible for work permits under “temporary protected status.”

West Virginia has attracted few migrants in recent decades. Its lack of existing immigrant communities in its cities and towns has made it less likely for new migrants to head to those places, immigration experts said.

Nonetheless, in West Virginia as in much of the country, the border and migration are potent political issues. Nationally, more respondents to The Wall Street Journal’s February poll cited immigration and border security than any other issue as their most important concern in this fall’s election. Former President Donald Trump, the presumed Republican nominee, has made it a central part of his campaign. Trump carried 68% of West Virginia’s votes in 2020, his highest share of any state.

West Virginia state Sen. Mike Stuart, a Republican who sponsored one of the bills to fund for razor wire along the border in Texas, said immigration is among the top concerns he hears from voters. “I think we’re in a pre-emptive mode right now to try to make sure we don’t become a tent community like what we see on television,” he said.

Rabbi Victor Urecki, who set up a short-lived refugee-resettlement program in Charleston in 2016, said the state has become less welcoming since he moved to the area in the 1980s. He said Trump has tapped into a distrust of outsiders that is part of human nature but more potent in a place that remembers better days. “When things are falling apart,” he said, “it’s hard for people to look in the mirror.”

Some other places have viewed the recent immigration wave as an opportunity to have more workers generating economic output and tax revenue.

The capital of Kansas has launched a Spanish-language marketing campaign, “Choose Topeka,” hoping to draw workers to fill thousands of open jobs. Maine, one of just three states with a population older than West Virginia’s, is creating an Office of New Americans tasked with “welcoming and supporting immigrants to strengthen Maine’s workforce.”

The Republican governors of Utah and Indiana have asked Congress to let states sponsor immigrant visas to help them fill hundreds of thousands of open jobs. Utah also has extended in-state tuition to refugees, asylum seekers and other migrant groups.

Not everyone necessarily benefits from increased immigration. An influx of migrants could exacerbate housing shortages or put downward pressure on competing workers’ wages. Neither is much of a risk in West Virginia, which had the nation’s fourth-highest rate of vacant housing and the second-highest rate of job openings in 2023.

‘Vicious cycle’

The number of locations where business is conducted in West Virginia declined 9.3% between 2011 and 2021, according to the Census Bureau, the biggest drop in the U.S.

“We suffer from this vicious cycle,” said John Deskins, director of West Virginia University’s bureau of business and economic research. “The people who move away tend to be younger, more educated, more prepared for the workforce. And it makes the remainers older.”

Elected officials have tried almost everything they can think of to shore up the workforce, except encourage immigration. Justice signed into law last year what he said was the biggest income-tax cut in West Virginia history, advertised as, among other things, a way to attract workers and business.

The legislature, where Republicans outnumber Democrats 31-3 in the Senate and 89-11 in the House of Delegates, has weighed tightening requirements on unemployment benefits in hopes of nudging some of the unemployed back to work.

The state also relaxed qualification standards for public-school teachers, expedited permitting for major projects and floated measures to draw retired veterans.

Former Intuit CEO and native son Brad D. Smith, now president of Marshall University in Huntington, launched a program in 2021 offering $12,000 checks and free co-working space and outdoor-gear rentals to remote workers who relocate to the state. The program is only open to U.S. citizens and green-card holders, a criteria intended to attract people likely to stay in West Virginia long-term, administrators said. Four of the 226 grantees so far are from other countries: Germany, Canada, Ukraine and Colombia.

The governor has talked up the state’s tourism prospects. Justice owns the historic Greenbrier resort in the southeastern corner of the state, which has long employed international students and other foreign workers in seasonal jobs. Justice didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Pendleton County, which boasts trout streams, caverns and a sizable rock-climbing area, is the sort of place that the governor’s tourism push is designed to benefit. County commissioners say revenue from Airbnb rentals and second-home purchases has kept their budget growing even though the population has declined 21% since 2010, to around 6,000.

While tourists increase demand for services, though, they don’t boost the local workforce, exacerbating labor shortages.

In the five years that Lantz has run the Pendleton County Senior Center, the number of direct-care workers has declined to 12, from 30. Such workers help old people get out of bed, bathe and prepare meals, and they sometimes call 911. They are essential for the growing number of elderly who don’t have family nearby.

Few locals are drawn by the pay of $10 to $12 an hour, though. As a result, about 15 people are on the wait list for at-home care—almost as many as the senior center serves, Lantz said. Around five people on the list have died in recent years.

In many places, eldercare is performed disproportionately by immigrants. They make up 14% of the U.S. population but 32% of home-care workers, according to PHI, a nonprofit that advocates for such services.

But immigrants aren’t coming to Pendleton County on their own, and the county hasn’t taken any measures to encourage them. Local officials cited the lack of public transportation, language barriers, shortages of teachers and potential strains on the volunteer-based emergency services among the reasons.

A closed Navy facility in Sugar Grove with scores of housing units has been empty since 2015, and local officials only informally discussed the possibility of using it to house migrant workers at a JBS chicken plant in the neighboring county. A JBS spokeswoman said the company wasn’t approached about the idea, and is building a 153-unit apartment complex to provide affordable housing to plant workers.

Some Franklin residents, asked whether migrants are a potential solution to their labor woes, brought up a variety of concerns. “If they don’t work, there’s going to be crimes and drugs,” said one man who was chatting with the owner of the town’s used-furniture store.

Franklin’s representative in the state’s House of Delegates, Republican Elias Coop-Gonzalez, moved to West Virginia from Guatemala as a teenager—his father is American—making him one of the few foreign-born residents of his 94% white district.

This year, he co-sponsored a bill that would apply to a category of immigrants called “inspected unauthorized aliens”—those who haven’t entered the U.S. through an official port of entry but whom the federal government has allowed to stay and work while their legal status is in limbo.

If the bill becomes law, it would establish a program to transport them out of West Virginia.

“If people cross the border, and they can get away with breaking the law…it’s just going to exacerbate the problem,” Coop-Gonzalez said. Because the federal government is failing to secure the border, he said, “the state has to take some measures to push back.”

Write to Paul Kiernan at [email protected]