S.D.'s low unemployment rate is bad news for employers.We still have a labor shortage here. We need immigrants.
Even though South Dakota’s unemployment rate ticked up by a tenth of a percentage point last July, we still have one of the lowest rates in the nation at 1.9%, which places us at 4th lowest in the country.
This is great news for job seekers, but only underscores a persistent problem for employers, who have to contend with being in a state that has the most job openings available for the fewest unemployed in the country. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, our state is right down there with our North Dakota neighbors when it comes to the unemployed/job openings ratio, an index that the Chamber puts at 38. In other words, for every 38 unemployed South Dakotans, there are 100 job openings. By comparison, Minnesota has 61 workers available for every 100 job openings. Iowa has 59. Wyoming has 55. We land in the Chamber’s “most severe” category with Montana, North Dakota and Nebraska, which makes this more a regional than a South Dakota-specific problem.
Gov. Kristi Noem has responded to the situation by developing a recruitment program.
Because its onset was last June, it’s hard to gauge the success of Gov. Noem’s “Freedom Works Here” campaign to recruit workers to South Dakota, but according to her website, Noem’s program is having some early success. Touting the results as “fantastic” in a report she made a month ago, Noem says the program had by then received over 4,000 applicants, including 816 individuals who are ‘in the process of moving to South Dakota.”
Overall, South Dakota does have a strong track record when it comes to in- vs. out-migration, with practically all of the gains concentrated in our population centers, including Lincoln, Pennington and Minnehaha Counties. As to the state’s rural counties, the table (which tracks the period 2010-2019, slightly dated but the most recent I could find) I’m using shows them mostly in decline. Overall, though, a current study from the Dakota Institute concludes that migration, including international migration, is still the driving force for our overall population increase.
But, notable as the population increase is, we still have the problem of a labor shortage. Apparently available job growth is outpacing population growth. Gov. Noem’s recruitment campaign is admirable, but doesn’t reach out far enough. It bypasses a pool of potential workers that could do much to alleviate the most-severe-in-the-nation labor shortage. I’m talking about foreign immigrants.
In 2022, foreign-born workers accounted for 18% of the U.S. labor force. That percentage is much smaller in South Dakota. According to the most updated report I could find from The American Immigration Council, immigrants account for just 5.3% of our state’s labor force.
My hope is that South Dakota can expand its workforce recruitment efforts to specifically target foreign immigrants, including finding some way of channeling those folks clamoring to get into this country through our southern border. We have jobs that are going begging here. There are people who are desperate to fill them just a few hundred miles away. This is the time and place for elected leadership to find a way to make a match and get some of them to work in South Dakota.
John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary hLondonave also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam.
