Help Wanted

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Oct. 3, 2026

The United States has an unemployment problem, but not because there are no available jobs. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national unemployment rate as this is being written is 4.1 percent and, according to the state of Michigan’s own data, our unemployment rate at the end of August was 5.0 percent.

But there are jobs aplenty currently open. The National Federation of Independent Businesses says fully 35 percent of small business owners report job openings and 56 percent are currently trying to hire. According to that same Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 7.3 million job openings nationally at the end of July—205,000 in Michigan, or 1.2 unemployed people for every job opening.

The problem is that way too often the job applicants do not have the requisite qualifications for the available jobs. Many require specialized skills, training, or education the applicants lack. Employers are having particular difficulty filling openings for registered nurses, physical therapists, computer technicians, and engineers, not to mention the trades like plumbers, electricians, and HVAC workers. Shortages even exist in unskilled construction jobs. In fact, according to Lighthouse Hiring, a whopping 82 percent of job applicants do not meet the required qualifications in the above mentioned categories.

Then there is the agricultural sector, devastated by immigration round-ups and dramatic price hikes for fertilizers and diesel fuel. Dirt-to-Diner describes itself as an education organization that provides information on how food travels from the farm to the consumer. They keep track of farm employment among other metrics.

They say 56 percent of farmers report labor shortages impacting both planting and harvesting. For those who believe illegal immigrants are taking jobs that would have otherwise been filled by U.S. citizens, Dirt-to-Diner has some unsettling facts for you. In 2025, there were 415,000 advertised labor jobs on U.S. farms. Of those 415,000, a pathetic 182 were filled by U.S. citizens. Even Congress acknowledges undocumented laborers plant and harvest much if not most of the food we eat; their data indicates between 50 percent and 70 percent of the agriculture workforce is still undocumented.

Itinerant migrant workers of the sort who used to “follow the fruit” up western Michigan, including our cherry harvest, formerly a significant percentage of those harvesting our crops, now comprise just 4 percent of that workforce. While some row crops like corn, wheat, and soy beans can now be harvested by machine, some vegetables and nuts and most fruits must still be harvested by human hands. Even worse, much of the harvest of many crops is time sensitive, so delays can cause a crop to fail on the tree or on the vine.

More than a million legal and illegal immigrants have disappeared from the job market in the last five years, according to Preliminary Census Data, though there is no data on if and where they were employed. We do know that recent immigration sweeps have caught many employed non-citizens.

That same census data indicated that prior to the most recent immigration sweeps, more than 74 percent of illegal immigrants were in the U.S. workforce. They worked in our fields, slaughterhouses, processing plants, packing plants, canning operations; in short, the unpleasant but necessary jobs American citizens shun. They bused our restaurant tables, mowed our lawns, and cleaned our hotel rooms.

If, as the usually reliable Pew Research Center says, there are about 12 million undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S. and 75 percent are employed, that means nine million jobs are now being filled by employees at risk of deportation and more job openings likely going unfilled by American citizens.

When the current ICE immigration crackdown was announced as an effort to find and deport the “worst of the worst,” those who had arrived only to commit heinous crimes once here or to escape punishment for such crimes back home, support was nearly universal. But we quickly abandoned that idea and just started rounding up everybody we could find, including taking them away from job sites, courtrooms, even college campuses.

So we created more job openings. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a non-partisan research organization located at Syracuse University, found that 70.6 percent of ICE detainees have no criminal record of any kind at all, including traffic citations. (There are currently 65,000 to 75,000 ICE detainees, but the number changes daily.)

Our labor shortage is partly the result of changing demands in the workforce requiring different skillsets in many industries. It’s also because we’ve created the shortages ourselves with a shortsighted and often cruel immigration crackdown that generates headlines but benefits almost no one.

We understand the politics at play here, but pulling workers out of the fields also takes food off the grocery store shelves and off our plates. Immigration policies that lack common sense do more harm than good.