Economic boom may complicate immigration efforts

One of President Donald Trump’s priorities, low unemployment, is complicating another: curbing immigration.

With the number of jobs available exceeding the number of Americans seeking jobs, employers are looking beyond the border to fill openings, and migrants are coming to the country in search of work.

Hotel and restaurant owner Todd Callewaert is short more than two dozen workers this season for his Mackinac Island, Mich., businesses. “You can’t hire a line cook right now, it’s impossible, even for 20 bucks an hour,” he said. “We usually fill the gap with visa workers, but we can’t even get those this year.”

The Labor Department said Friday the unemployment rate was 3.9 percent, near the 18- year low set in May, and employers are adding jobs at a faster pace than last year.

Trump has made clear employers should be trying to attract American workers through wage increases and other incentives, not filling jobs with immigrants.

“Curbing immigration is essential to growing wages and ensuring available jobs go to American workers, not foreign workers,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Hogan Gidley told AP. “As immigration curbs are put into place, more and more Americans will be absorbed back into the workforce, especially those who have been left out due to poor work history or difficult life circumstances.”

The administration has made it harder to come to the U. S. for work, legally or otherwise. Work visas are costly, complicated and limited. Large- scale, jobseeking migration through a porous border is long gone.

This summer, the administration tried to deter would- be immigrants by adopting a “zero- tolerance” policy, prosecuting anyone caught crossing the border illegally. It resulted in nearly 3,000 children separated from their parents at the border, prompting international outrage. Trump eventually stopped the separations and the government was forced by a judge to reunify families.

Still, tens of thousands of people cross the border illegally every month, many seeking asylum from violence. But often, they’re coming because of the pros- pect of work.

Dala Edilson Ba Juc traveled with his 12- year- old daughter from Guatemala to the U. S. — only to be separated from her at the border, reunited and deported home. Sitting at an immigration facility in Guatemala City, he said they came for work.

“I needed to try to make a better life for my family — I wanted them to have what I could not give them here,” he said. “There are many, many jobs in the States.”

Frandy Frauville, 35, joined a wave of Haitians who came to Tijuana, Mexico, from Brazil starting in 2016. Brazil welcomed Haitians after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. But Frauville grew tired of factory jobs in Mexico that barely allowed him to cover rent and food, and, lured by the prospects of better work and joining family near Miami, he lined up with his 5- year- old daughter at a border crossing.

“I’ll take whatever I can get,” he said.

And Rolando Antonio Bueso Castillo, who was separated from his infant Johan, was making only $ 10 a day driving a bus in Honduras. He was captured and quickly deported while his baby remained behind for five months.

He said he made the difficult journey because his brother had secured him a job in Maryland. Someday, he said, his son will ask what happened, and why he had left him in the United States.

“I’ll tell him the truth,” he said. “We thought we had a good plan to give him a better life.”

Many economists say immigration is actually good for the economy and migrants provide complementary work to the jobs Americans do. Despite Trump’s push, some business owners say they just can’t get Americans to fill the jobs.

A. J. Erskine is vice president of Cowart Seafood Group, which includes a Virginia oyster company of about 75 employees. “Entrylevel is $ 12.13 an hour,” he said. “I don’t know how much higher we can go without being unable to sell oysters. He said the company has been in business more than a half- century, and that despite massive recruiting efforts, it can’t keep American workers.

“We just don’t have people who want to come out and shuck oysters at 3 in the morning — and I don’t blame them,” he said.