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    U.S. Pours Money Into Chips, but Even Soaring Spending Has Limits

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    In September, the chip giant Intel gathered officials at a patch of land near Columbus, Ohio, where it pledged to invest at least $20 billion in two new factories to make semiconductors.A month later, Micron Technology celebrated a new manufacturing site near Syracuse, N.Y., where the chip company expected to spend $20 billion by the end of the decade and eventually perhaps five times that.And in December, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company hosted a shindig in Phoenix, where it plans to triple its investment to $40 billion and build a second new factory to create advanced chips.The pledges are part of an enormous ramp-up in U.S. chip-making plans over the past 18 months, the scale of which has been likened to Cold War-era investments in the Space Race. The boom has implications for global technological leadership and geopolitics, with the United States aiming to prevent China from becoming an advanced power in chips, the slices of silicon that have driven the creation of innovative computing devices like smartphones and virtual-reality goggles.Today, chips are an essential part of modern life even beyond the tech industry’s creations, from military gear and cars to kitchen appliances and toys.Across the nation, more than 35 companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for manufacturing projects related to chips since the spring of 2020, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group. The money is set to be spent in 16 states, including Texas, Arizona and New York on 23 new chip factories, the expansion of nine plants, and investments from companies supplying equipment and materials to the industry.The push is one facet of an industrial policy initiative by the Biden administration, which is dangling at least $76 billion in grants, tax credits and other subsidies to encourage domestic chip production. Along with providing sweeping funding for infrastructure and clean energy, the efforts constitute the largest U.S. investment in manufacturing arguably since World War II, when the federal government unleashed spending on new ships, pipelines and factories to make aluminum and rubber.“I’ve never seen a tsunami like this,” said Daniel Armbrust, the former chief executive of Sematech, a now-defunct chip consortium formed in 1987 with the Defense Department and funding from member companies.Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron Technology’s chief executive, at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, N.Y., in October. The company is building a new manufacturing site nearby.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesWhite House officials have argued that the chip-making investments will sharply reduce the proportion of chips needed to be purchased from abroad, improving U.S. economic security.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesPresident Biden has staked a prominent part of his economic agenda on stimulating U.S. chip production, but his reasons go beyond the economic benefits. Much of the world’s cutting-edge chips today are made in Taiwan, the island to which China claims territorial rights. That has caused fears that semiconductor supply chains may be disrupted in the event of a conflict — and that the United States will be at a technological disadvantage.More on ChinaA Messy Pivot: As Beijing casts aside many Covid rules after nationwide protests, it is also playing down the threat of the virus. The move comes with its own risks.Space Program: Human spaceflight achievements show that China is running a steady space marathon rather than competing in a head-to-head space race with the United States.A Test for the Economy: China’s economy is entering a delicate period when it will face unique challenges, amid the prospect of rising Covid cases and wary consumers.New Partnerships: A trip by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Saudi Arabia showcased Beijing’s growing ties with several Middle Eastern countries that are longstanding U.S. allies and signaled China’s re-emergence after years of pandemic isolation.The new U.S. production efforts may correct some of these imbalances, industry executives said — but only up to a point.The new chip factories would take years to build and might not be able to offer the industry’s most advanced manufacturing technology when they begin operations. Companies could also delay or cancel the projects if they aren’t awarded sufficient subsidies by the White House. And a severe shortage in skills may undercut the boom, as the complex factories need many more engineers than the number of students who are graduating from U.S. colleges and universities.The bonanza of money on U.S. chip production is “not going to try or succeed in accomplishing self-sufficiency,” said Chris Miller, an associate professor of international history at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and the author of a recent book on the chip industry’s battles.White House officials have argued that the chip-making investments will sharply reduce the proportion of chips needed to be purchased from abroad, improving U.S. economic security. At the TSMC event in December, Mr. Biden also highlighted the potential impact on tech companies like Apple that rely on TSMC for their chip-making needs. He said that “it could be a game changer” as more of these companies “bring more of their supply chain home.”U.S. companies led chip production for decades starting in the late 1950s. But the country’s share of global production capacity gradually slid to around 12 percent from about 37 percent in 1990, as countries in Asia provided incentives to move manufacturing to those shores.Today, Taiwan accounts for about 22 percent of total chip production and more than 90 percent of the most advanced chips made, according to industry analysts and the Semiconductor Industry Association.The new spending is set to improve America’s position. A $50 billion government investment is likely to prompt corporate spending that would take the U.S. share of global production to as much as 14 percent by 2030, according to a Boston Consulting Group study in 2020 that was commissioned by the Semiconductor Industry Association.“It really does put us in the game for the first time in decades,” said John Neuffer, the association’s president, who added that the estimate may be conservative because Congress approved $76 billion in subsidies in a piece of legislation known as the CHIPS Act.Still, the ramp-up is unlikely to eliminate U.S. dependence on Taiwan for the most advanced chips. Such chips are the most powerful because they pack the highest number of transistors onto each slice of silicon, and they are often held up a sign of a nation’s technological progress.Intel long led the race to shrink the number of transistors on a chip, which is usually described in nanometers, or billionths of a meter, with smaller numbers indicating the most cutting-edge production technology. Then TSMC surged ahead in recent years.But at its Phoenix site, TSMC may not import its most advanced manufacturing technology. The company initially announced that it would produce five-nanometer chips at the Phoenix factory, before saying last month that it would also make four-nanometer chips there by 2024 and build a second factory, which will open in 2026, for three-nanometer chips. It stopped short of discussing further advances.Morris Chang, founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, at the company’s site in Phoenix in December. The company said it would triple its investment there to $40 billion.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesAt the TSMC event last month, President Biden highlighted the potential impact on tech companies that rely on TSMC for their chip-making needs.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesIn contrast, TSMC’s factories in Taiwan at the end of 2022 began producing three-nanometer technology. By 2025, factories in Taiwan will probably start supplying Apple with two-nanometer chips, said Handel Jones, chief executive at International Business Strategies.TSMC and Apple declined to comment.Whether other chip companies will bring more advanced technology for cutting-edge chips to their new sites is unclear. Samsung Electronics plans to invest $17 billion in a new factory in Texas but has not disclosed its production technology. Intel is manufacturing chips at roughly seven nanometers, though it has said its U.S. factories will turn out three-nanometer chips by 2024 and even more advanced products soon after that.The spending boom is also set to reduce, though not erase, U.S. reliance on Asia for other kinds of chips. Domestic factories produce only about 4 percent of the world’s memory chips — which are needed to store data in computers, smartphones and other consumer devices — and Micron’s planned investments could eventually raise that percentage.But there are still likely to be gaps in a catchall variety of older, simpler chips, which were in such short supply over the past two years that U.S. automakers had to shut down factories and produce partly finished vehicles. TSMC is a major producer of some of these chips, but it is focusing its new investments on more profitable plants for advanced chips.“We still have a dependency that is not being impacted in any way shape or form,” said Michael Hurlston, chief executive of Synaptics, a Silicon Valley chip designer that relies heavily on TSMC’s older factories in Taiwan.The chip-making boom is expected to create a jobs bonanza of 40,000 new roles in factories and companies that supply them, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. That would add to about 277,000 U.S. semiconductor industry employees.But it won’t be easy to fill so many skilled positions. Chip factories typically need technicians to run factory machines and scientists in fields like electrical and chemical engineering. The talent shortage is one of the industry’s toughest challenges, according to recent surveys of executives.The CHIPS Act contains funding for work force development. The Commerce Department, which is overseeing the doling out of grant money from the CHIPS Act’s funds, has also made it clear that organizations hoping to obtain funding should come up with plans for training and educating workers.Intel, responding to the issue, plans to invest $100 million to spur training and research at universities, community colleges and other technical educators. Purdue University, which built a new semiconductor laboratory, has set a goal of graduating 1,000 engineers each year and has attracted the chip maker SkyWater Technology to build a $1.8 billion manufacturing plant near its Indiana campus.Yet training may go only so far, as chip companies compete with other industries that are in dire need of workers.“We’re going to have to build a semiconductor economy that attracts people when they have a lot of other choices,” Mitch Daniels, who was president of Purdue at the time, said at an event in September.Since training efforts may take years to bear fruit, industry executives want to make it easier for highly educated foreign workers to obtain visas to work in the United States or stay after they get their degrees. Officials in Washington are aware that comments encouraging more immigration could invite political fire.But Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, was forthright in a speech in November at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Attracting the world’s best scientific minds is “an advantage that is America’s to lose,” she said. “And we’re not going to let that happen.” More

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    Illegal Immigration Is Down, Changing the Face of California Farms

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    Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.GONZALES, Calif. — It looks like a century-old picture of farming in California: a few dozen Mexican men on their knees, plucking radishes from the ground, tying them into bundles. But the crews on Sabor Farms’ radish patch, about a mile south of the Salinas River, represent the cutting edge of change, a revolution in how America pulls food from the land.For starters, the young men on their knees are working alongside technology unseen even 10 years ago. Crouched behind what looks like a tractor retrofitted with a packing plant, they place bunches of radishes on a conveyor belt within arm’s reach, which carries them through a cold wash and delivers them to be packed into crates and delivered for distribution in a refrigerated truck.The other change is more subtle, but no less revolutionary. None of the workers are in the United States illegally.Both of these transformations are driven by the same dynamic: the decline in the supply of young illegal immigrants from Mexico, the backbone of the work force picking California’s crops since the 1960s.The new demographic reality has sent farmers scrambling to bring in more highly paid foreign workers on temporary guest-worker visas, experiment with automation wherever they can and even replace crops with less labor-intensive alternatives.“Back in the day, you had people galore,” said Vanessa Quinlan, director of human resources at Sabor Farms. These days, not so much: Some 90 percent of Sabor’s harvest workers come from Mexico on temporary visas, said Jess Quinlan, the farm’s president and Ms. Quinlan’s husband. “We needed to make sure we had bodies available when the crop is ready,” he said.For all the anxiety over the latest surge in immigration, Mexicans — who constitute most of the unauthorized immigrants in the United States and most of the farmworkers in California — are not coming in the numbers they once did.There are a variety of reasons: The aging of Mexico’s population slimmed the cohort of potential migrants. Mexico’s relative stability after the financial crises of the 1980s and 1990s reduced the pressures for them to leave, while the collapse of the housing bubble in the United States slashed demand for their work north of the border. Stricter border enforcement by the United States, notably during the Trump administration, has further dented the flow.“The Mexican migration wave to the United States has now crested,” the economists Gordon Hanson and Craig McIntosh wrote.As a consequence, the total population of unauthorized immigrants in the United States peaked in 2007 and has declined slightly since then. California felt it first. From 2010 to 2018, the unauthorized immigrant population in the state declined by some 10 percent, to 2.6 million. And the dwindling flow sharply reduced the supply of young workers to till fields and harvest crops on the cheap.The state reports that from 2010 to 2020, the average number of workers on California farms declined to 150,000 from 170,000. The number of undocumented immigrant workers declined even faster. The Labor Department’s most recent National Agricultural Workers Survey reports that in 2017 and 2018, unauthorized immigrants accounted for only 36 percent of crop workers hired by California farms. That was down from 66 percent, according to the surveys performed 10 years earlier.The immigrant work force has also aged. In 2017 and 2018, the average crop worker hired locally on a California farm was 43, according to the survey, eight years older than in the surveys performed from 2007 to 2009. The share of workers under the age of 25 dropped to 7 percent from a quarter.The radish harvest at Sabor Farms. “Back in the day, you had people galore,” the company’s human resources director said. Desperate to find an alternative, farms turned to a tool they had largely shunned for years: the H-2A visa, which allows them to import workers for a few months of the year.The visa was created during the immigration reform of 1986 as a concession to farmers who complained that the legalization of millions of unauthorized immigrants would deprive them of their labor force, as newly legalized workers would seek better jobs outside agriculture.But farmers found the H-2A process too expensive. Under the rules, they had to provide H-2A workers with housing, transportation to the fields and even meals. And they had to pay them the so-called adverse effect wage rate, calculated by the Agriculture Department to ensure they didn’t undercut the wages of domestic workers.It remained cheaper and easier for farmers to hire the younger immigrants who kept on coming illegally across the border. (Employers must demand documents proving workers’ eligibility to work, but these are fairly easy to fake.)That is no longer the case. There are some 35,000 workers on H-2A visas across California, 14 times as many as in 2007. During the harvest they crowd the low-end motels dotting California’s farm towns. A 1,200-bed housing facility exclusive to H-2A workers just opened in Salinas. In King City, some 50 miles south, a former tomato processing shed was retrofitted to house them.“In the United States we have an aging and settled illegal work force,” said Philip Martin, an expert on farm labor and migration at the University of California, Davis. “The fresh blood are the H-2As.” Immigrant guest workers are unlikely to fill the labor hole on America’s farms, though. For starters, they are costlier than the largely unauthorized workers they are replacing. The adverse effect wage rate in California this year is $17.51, well above the $15 minimum wage that farmers must pay workers hired locally.So farmers are also looking elsewhere. “We are living on borrowed time,” said Dave Puglia, president and chief executive of Western Growers, the lobby group for farmers in the West. “I want half the produce harvest mechanized in 10 years. There’s no other solution.”Produce that is hardy or doesn’t need to look pretty is largely harvested mechanically already, from processed tomatoes and wine grapes to mixed salad greens and tree nuts. Sabor Farms has been using machines to harvest salad mix for decades.“Processed food is mostly automated,” said Walt Duflock, who runs Western Growers’ Center for Innovation and Technology in Salinas, a point for tech entrepreneurs to meet farmers. “Now the effort is on the fresh side.”“It scares me that they are coming with H-2As and also with robots,” said José Luis Hernández, who emigrated from Mexico as a teenager.“We used to prune the leaves on the vine with our hands, but they brought in the robots last year,” said Ancelmo Zamudio, a vineyard worker.Apples are being grown on trellises for easy harvesting. Scientists have developed genetically modified “high rise” broccoli with long stems to be harvested mechanically. Pruning and trimming of trees and vines is increasingly automated. Lasers have been brought into fields for weeding. Biodegradable “plant tape” packed with seeds and nutrients can now be germinated in nurseries and transplanted with enormous machines that just unspool the tape into the field.A few rows down from the crew harvesting radish bunches at Sabor Farms’ patch, the Quinlans are running a fancy automatic radish harvester they bought from the Netherlands. Operated by three workers, it plucks individual radishes from the ground and spews them into crates in a truck driving by its side.And yet automation has limits. Harvesting produce that can’t be bruised or butchered by a robot remains a challenge. A survey by the Western Growers Center for Innovation and Technology found that about two-thirds of growers of specialty crops like fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts have invested in automation over the last three years. Still, they expect that only about 20 percent of the lettuce, apple and broccoli harvest — and none of the strawberry harvest — will be automated by 2025.Some crops are unlikely to survive. Acreage devoted to crops like bell peppers, broccoli and fresh tomatoes is declining. And foreign suppliers are picking up much of the slack. Fresh and frozen fruit and vegetable imports almost doubled over the last five years, to $31 billion in 2021.Consider asparagus, a particularly labor-intensive crop. Only 4,000 acres of it were harvested across the state in 2020, down from 37,000 two decades earlier. The state minimum wage of $15, added to the new requirement to pay overtime after 40 hours a week, is squeezing it further after growers in the Mexican state of Sinaloa — where workers make some $330 a month — increased the asparagus acreage almost threefold over 15 years, to 47,000 acres in 2020.H-2A workers won’t help fend off the cheaper Mexican asparagus. They are even more expensive than local workers, about half of whom are immigrants from earlier waves that gained legal status; about a third are undocumented. And capital is not rushing in to automate the crop.“There are no unicorns there,” said Neill Callis, who manages the asparagus packing shed at the Turlock Fruit Company, which grows some 300 acres of asparagus in the San Joaquin Valley east of Salinas. “You can’t seduce a V.C. with the opportunity to solve a $2-per-carton problem for 50 million cartons,” he said.While Turlock has automated where it can, introducing a German machine to sort, trim and bunch spears in the packing shed, the harvest is still done by hand — hunched workers walk up the rows stabbing at the spears with an 18-inch-long knife.These days, Mr. Callis said, Turlock is hanging on to the asparagus crop mainly to ensure its labor supply. Providing jobs during the asparagus harvest from February to May helps the farm hang on to its regular workers — 240 in the field and about 180 in the shed it co-owns with another farm — for the critical summer harvest of 3,500 acres of melons.Workers harvested asparagus by hand on a farm in Firebaugh, Calif.Losing its source of cheap illegal immigrant workers will change California. Other employers heavily reliant on cheap labor — like builders, landscapers, restaurants and hotels — will have to adjust.Paradoxically, the changes raking across California’s fields seem to threaten the undocumented local work force farmers once relied on. Ancelmo Zamudio from Chilapa, in Mexico’s state of Guerrero, and José Luis Hernández from Ejutla in Oaxaca crossed into the United States when they were barely in their teens, over 15 years ago. Now they live in Stockton, working mostly on the vineyards in Lodi and Napa.They were building a life in the United States. They brought their wives with them; had children; hoped that they might be able to legalize their status somehow, perhaps through another shot at immigration reform like the one of 1986.Things to them look decidedly cloudier. “We used to prune the leaves on the vine with our hands, but they brought in the robots last year,” Mr. Zamudio complained. “They said it was because there were no people.”Mr. Hernández grumbles about H-2A workers, who earn more even if they have less experience, and don’t have to pay rent or support a family. He worries about rising rents — pushed higher by new arrivals from the Bay Area. The rule compelling farmers to pay overtime after 40 hours of work per week is costing him money, he complains, because farmers slashed overtime and cut his workweek from six days to five.He worries about the future. “It scares me that they are coming with H-2As and also with robots,” he said. “That’s going to take us down.” More

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    Missing Foreign Workers Add to Hiring Challenges

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    Fewer foreign people have been able to work in the U.S. amid the coronavirus, leaving a hole in the potential labor force.Neha Mahajan was a television journalist in India before her husband’s job moved her family to the United States in 2008. She spent years locked out of the labor market, confined by what she calls the “gilded cage” of her immigration status — one that the pandemic placed her back into.Ms. Mahajan started working after an Obama administration rule change in 2015 allowed people on spousal visas to hold jobs, and she took a new job in business development at an immigration law firm early in 2021. But processing delays tied to the pandemic caused her work authorization to expire in July, forcing her to take leave.“It just gets to you emotionally and drains you out,” said Ms. Mahajan, 39, who lives in Scotch Plains, N.J.Last week brought reprieve, if only temporarily. She received approval documents for her renewed work authorization, enabling her to return to the labor force. But a process that should have taken three months stretched to 10, leaving her sidelined all summer. And because her visa is linked to her husband’s, she will need to reapply for authorization again in December when his visa comes up for renewal.Hundreds of thousands of foreign workers have gone missing from the labor market as the global coronavirus pandemic drags on, leaving holes in white-collar professions like the one Ms. Mahajan works in and in more service-oriented jobs in beach towns and at ski resorts. Newcomers and applicants for temporary visas were initially limited by policy changes under former President Donald J. Trump, who used a series of executive actions to slow many types of legal immigration. Then pandemic-era travel restrictions and bureaucratic backlogs caused immigration to drop precipitously, threatening a long-term loss of talent and economic potential.Some of those missing would-be employees will probably come and work as travel restrictions lift and as visa processing backlogs clear, as Ms. Mahajan’s example suggests. But the recent immigration lost to the pandemic is likely to leave a permanent hole. Goldman Sachs estimated in research this month that the economy was short 700,000 temporary visa holders and permanent immigrant workers, and that perhaps 300,000 of those people would never come to work in the United States.Employers consistently complain that they are struggling to hire, and job openings exceed the number of people actively looking for work, even though millions fewer people are working compared with just before the pandemic. The slump in immigration is one of the many reasons for the disconnect. Companies dependent on foreign workers have found that waves of infections and processing delays at consulates are keeping would-be employees in their home countries, or stuck in America but simply unable to work.“Employers are having to wait a long time to get their petitions approved, and renewals are not being processed in a timely manner,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration lawyer who teaches at Cornell Law School. “It’s going to take a long time for them to work through the backlog.”Worker inflows had already slowed sharply before the pandemic, the result of a crackdown by the Trump administration that made it harder for foreign workers, refugees and migrant family members to enter the United States. But the pandemic took that decline and accelerated it dramatically: Overall visa issuance dropped by 4.7 million last year.Many of those visas would have gone to short-term visitors and tourists — people who likely will come back as travel restrictions lift. But hundreds of thousands of the visas would have gone to workers. Without them, some employers have been left struggling.Guests at Penny Fernald’s inn on Mount Desert Island in Maine had to swing by the front desk to pick up towels this summer. Turndown service was limited, because only one of the four foreign housekeepers Ms. Fernald would employ in a typical summer could make it through a consulate and into the country this year.Vacationers who wanted a reimagined Waldorf salad at Salt & Steel, a nearby restaurant, needed to call ahead for reservations and hope it wasn’t Sunday, when the short-staffed restaurant was closed.“This was the busiest season Bar Harbor has ever seen, and we turned people away nightly,” said Bobby Will, the chef and co-owner of Salt & Steel.He usually hires a few foreign workers who perform day jobs for other local businesses then work for him at night. This year, that was basically impossible. He found himself down six of 18 workers. He modified dishes to make them easier to plate — a lobster risotto with roasted chanterelles and hand-placed garnished became a seafood cassoulet — but labor-saving innovations were not enough of a fix. He ultimately had to close on Mondays, too, and he estimates that he missed out on $6,500 to $8,000 in sales per night.“It’s just been extremely difficult for Bar Harbor,” he said of his town, a summer tourism hot-spot nestled between Frenchman Bay and Acadia National Park.Many immigrants are missing from the labor market, causing staffing shortages both in white-collar professions and in more service-oriented jobs in vacation spots like Old Orchard Beach, Maine.Tristan Spinski for The New York TimesThe Biden administration lifted a Trump-era pandemic ban on legal immigration in February, and the number of foreign nationals coming into the United States on visas has been recovering this year. Monthly data show a nascent but incomplete rebound.But some visa categories that weren’t deemed high priority, including many temporary work authorizations, have been waiting long months for approval. Travel limitations tied to the pandemic have kept other foreign workers at home.The State Department reported that as of September, nearly half a million people remained in its immigrant visa backlog, compared with roughly 61,000 on average in 2019..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}It is not clear what the 2020 drop in immigration and the slow crawl back to normalcy will mean for the country’s labor pool going forward. The Goldman Sachs estimate that the U.S. is short 700,000 foreign workers was based on a rough methodology. The Congressional Budget Office estimated late last year that 2.5 million fewer people would immigrate in the 2020s than it had estimated before the pandemic. Immigration tends to build on itself as legal permanent residents bring in family members, so this decade’s decline is expected to lead to another 840,000 fewer immigrants between 2031 and 2040.The “reduction occurs in part because of travel restrictions and reduced visa-processing capabilities related to the pandemic,” the office wrote in its September 2020 long-term budget outlook.Either number amounts to a relatively small sliver of the American work force, which is today 161 million people strong. But from an economic perspective — and from the viewpoint of many American businesses — the timing could hardly be worse. America’s population is aging, and fertility rates have been declining. Work force growth in recent years has been heavily driven by immigrants and their children. Fewer immigrants means fewer future workers.Unless businesses can figure out how to produce more with fewer people, a future in which the nation’s working-age population grows more slowly means that the economy is likely to have less room for expansion.The pandemic immigration slump isn’t the cause of that economic sclerosis, but it could cause the condition to progress faster.While millions of Americans remain out of work and potentially available for jobs, employers say hiring has been complicated by pandemic aftershocks. Some households lack child care or are afraid of virus resurgence. Others are rethinking careers in backbreaking industries after a perspective-shifting collective public health trauma. Often immigrants work jobs that struggle to attract native workers.Some companies are reluctant to pay enough to attract locals. Ms. Fernald did receive some applications for housekeeping positions, but she pays $16.50 per hour and the applicants had hoped for $20 to $23.Even for those who were willing to pay what would-be laborers demand — Mr. Will paid cooks $22 per hour and guaranteed 10 hours a week in overtime — it was difficult to make up for missing local exchange student workers and temporary seasonal employees from abroad. He’s hoping hiring will be easier in 2022.“Honestly, I don’t know what to expect,” he said.Ms. Mahajan in New Jersey offered a glint of hope that some sort of normalcy could return, but also apprehension that it will not.“I couldn’t believe it — I was like, ‘Wow,’” she said of the moment she received her approval. But the relief may be short-lived since her visa is inextricably linked to her husband’s lapsing one.“Even before summer, I could be back in the same situation,” she said. “This is like an infinite rut.” More

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    U.K. Braces for a Difficult Holiday Season Due to Shortages

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    Military personnel are driving transport trucks. Pig farmers may start culling their stock. Even the government says shortages will affect Christmas, as Britons brace for a challenging winter.BUNGAY, England — To understand the deep sense of anxiety Britons feel about the supply shortages currently afflicting the nation — and threatening disruptions to the Christmas dinner table — one need only travel to Simon Watchorn’s pig farm, about two hours northeast of London.In 2014, Mr. Watchorn was England’s pig farmer of the year, with a thriving business. But this year, he said, the outlook for the fall is bleak.Slaughterhouses are understaffed and are processing a smaller-than-usual number of pigs. There is a shortage of drivers to move pork to grocery stores and butcher shops. And there are fewer butchers to prepare the meat for consumers.If the problems persist, Mr. Watchorn may have to start culling some of his 7,500 pigs by the end of next month. Pigs grow about 15 pounds each week, and after a certain point, they are too big for slaughterhouses to process.Mr. Watchorn said the last time he can remember things being this bad was during an outbreak of mad cow disease in the late 1990s. “It’s a muddle,” he said. “It’s worse than a muddle, it’s a disaster, and I don’t know when it’s going to finish.”Mr. Watchorn, 66, is one of many producers of food and other goods warning of a daunting winter ahead for Britons. Shortages continued to bedevil the British economy on Monday as gas stations in London and in southeastern England reported trouble getting fuel, and the government began deploying military personnel to help ease the lack of drivers. Supermarket consortiums say pressures from rising transport costs, labor shortages and commodity costs are already pushing prices higher and will likely continue to do so.The chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, acknowledged on BBC Radio on Monday that there will shortages at Christmastime. He said the government was doing “everything we can” to mitigate the supply chain issues but admitted there was no “magic wand.”Mr. Watchorn, whose farm is near the town of Bungay, England, northeast of London, is convinced that Brexit is responsible for the current distress.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesMr. Watchorn, who prides himself on running a farm where all adult stock live outside, is convinced that Brexit is responsible for the current distress, saying the exodus of European workers from Britain had led to damaging labor shortages. The British people voted to break with the European Union to reduce immigration, he believes, without realizing how damaging a cliff-edge exit from the bloc would be for businesses.“They didn’t vote for supermarket shortages,” he said on Sunday as dozens of pigs gathered around him to be fed. “They didn’t understand that was going to be a probable, likely outcome.”Mr. Sunak and other Conservative leaders say supply problems are a global issue largely attributable to the pandemic and not limited to Britain. Indeed, businesses around the world are facing rising energy prices, product shortages and labor shortages.But the challenges in Britain are acute, with many industries facing a shortage of workers — in part because of the pandemic, but also, many business owners say, because of stricter immigration laws that came into effect after Britain’s exit from the European Union on Jan. 1.“We are desperately trying to find workers,” said Jon Hare, a spokesman for the British Meat Processors Association, which estimates that Britain is short of about 25,000 butchers and processing plant workers.He called on the government to issue more short-term visas to foreign workers to help the industry with the transition outside of the European Union. “There are only so many people you can take out of the production system before the system starts breaking down,” he said.A shopper confronted sparse food shelves in a Co-op supermarket in Harpenden, England, in September.Peter Cziborra/ReutersThe specter of disruptions to the holiday season is particularly resonant in Britain, where Christmas isn’t Christmas without traditional foods. And yet British meat producers say the dinner table could be lacking some of the seasonal specialties that people count on every December. That includes pigs in a blanket (bacon-wrapped sausages that are different from the American version), glazed ham and Yorkshire pudding, which require additional labor to prepare, Mr. Hare said.The National Pig Association has warned that about 120,000 pigs are backed up on farms because of a lack of slaughterhouse workers, and the British Poultry Council said it expected to cut Christmas turkey production by 20 percent. On Monday, protesters gathered outside of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester with signs that said “All we want for Christmas is our pigs in a blanket” and “#saveourbacon.”Consumers are already anticipating shortages. One farmer in Leeds said that by last month, customers had already ordered all 3,500 turkeys she was raising for Christmas — a first.A lack of truck drivers has also caused sporadic shortages for staples including eggs, milk and baked goods. One in six people in Britain said that in recent weeks they had not been able to buy certain essential food items because they were unavailable, according to a report by the Office for National Statistics, which surveyed about 3,500 households.Some consumers interviewed in recent days said they had not had any trouble finding what they wanted at grocery stores. But Meriem Mahdhi, 22, who moved from Italy to Colchester in southeast England last month to attend college, said she had struggled to find essential items at her local grocery store, Tesco, Britain’s largest supermarket chain.“All the dried foods like pasta, canned fruit, it’s all gone, every day,” she said. Tesco did not respond to a request for comment.Seeking a quick fix, 200 military personnel in fatigues on Monday arrived at refineries to help deliver fuel to gas stations. About half of them drove civilian vehicles and the others provided logistical support. “As an extra precaution we have put the extra drivers on,” Mr. Sunak said.Over the weekend, the government said it had extended thousands of temporary visas for foreign workers to work in Britain until the first few months of next year. But economists said the temporary visas were unlikely to be enough to make much of a difference, since there are shortages at every link in the supply chain.“There is a lack of workers coming in, and British people are not willing to do the job,” said Robert Elliott, a professor at the University of Birmingham. He said it was difficult to say how much of the supply-chain issues were a result of Brexit versus the pandemic, but regardless, the government has chosen policies that have not made the situation better.The government has underinvested in training workers to drive trucks, he said, and too few young people are pursuing the profession to replace ones who have retired.Even before Brexit, the meat industry had difficulties attracting workers because of the hard work, low pay and remote locations of processing plants. Producers have raised wages for butchers by an average of 10 percent this year, the British Meat Processors Association said, but shortages are still so severe that members of the British Poultry Council reported they had cut weekly chicken production by five to 10 percent.Mr. Watchorn said the situation was “a disaster, and I don’t know when it’s going to finish.”Andrew Testa for The New York TimesJames MacGregor, the general manager at Riverford, an organic food company based in Devon, England, said he was short of about 40 workers, or about 16 percent of the company. Butchers have been particularly hard to find, he said. To cope with the shortages, Riverford will likely offer fewer products for sale around Christmas.“It feels like we’re staring down the barrel of a gun a little bit at the moment,” Mr. MacGregor said. “It’s highly likely if we don’t see movement in terms of fuel and labor, we will ultimately end up passing some of this cost on to the consumer.”Kathy Martyn, the owner of Oakfield Farm in East Sussex, which has about 100 pigs, said she was relieved to find fuel on Friday, just in time to make it to a catering job for a wedding over the weekend. She said that fuel shortages have made planning difficult, and that she may have to cull about 20 of her pigs this year.“We’ll just roll up our sleeves and take a deep breath,” Ms. Martyn said.Mr. Watchorn, the pig farmer, said his farm will be losing money this year. Even culling pigs is costly. If it comes to that, he would have to find someone to slaughter the animals and then take them away. Financial help from the government to do that would help, but he said he was not counting on it. “When pigs fly,” he quipped.Mr. Watchorn said the last time he can remember things being this bad was during an outbreak of mad cow disease in the 1990s.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesAina J. Khan More

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    Lack of Foreign Workers Has Seasonal Businesses Scrambling

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    SALT LAKE CITY — Tyler Holt summed up the problem his Utah landscaping business faces every year. “People who want to be in the job force want stability — if they want to work, they work full time,” he said. “Locally there’s just no workers who want to do anything seasonal.”The complaint has been echoed not only by landscapers in Utah, but also by amusement parks in Wyoming, restaurants in Rhode Island, crab trappers in Maryland, camps in Colorado and thousands of other businesses around the country that depend on seasonal workers from abroad to work lower-wage nonfarm jobs.The scramble for these temporary guest workers has been intense in recent years, as the jobless rate inched down and tensions over immigration policy ratcheted up. But this year, after the coronavirus pandemic first halted and then seriously constrained the stream of foreign workers into the United States, the competition has been particularly fierce.The Biden administration responded to frantic pleas from small businesses in the spring. It did not renew a pandemic-related suspension of the J-1 program, which provides short-term visas designed for foreign students who come to the United States to work and travel. Soon after, it raised the quota on temporary visas under the H-2B program for temporary nonagricultural workers, which are issued through a lottery.But travel restrictions, backlogs and delays at foreign consulates in approving applicants have still left businesses from Maine to California in the lurch.Mr. Holt, the chief executive of Golden Landscaping and Lawn in Orem, asked for 60 H-2B workers, hoping the team could be in place by April 1, when the season began. He struck out in the initial lottery, but was luckier the second time around, when the administration increased the quota by one-third.On July 9, Mr. Holt was overjoyed to hear that his application had been approved. But now, roughly halfway through his eight-month season, still no workers have arrived.“Nothing,” he said with disgust when asked two weeks later about an update.Mr. Holt said he had raised his normal $14-an-hour wage — by $2, then $3, then $4 and then $5 — to attract local workers. “I will give anybody a job that wants to work,” he said. The crews he has in place are working 60 to 70 hours a week to keep up with the demand.Landscapers like Mr. Holt employ more H-2B workers than any other industry — roughly half of the total approved. And their inability to get a work force in place by the start of the season has been costly.Ken Doyle, the president of All States Landscaping in Draper, Utah, said the late arrival of 27 temporary foreign workers had cost him 15 to 20 percent of his business, about $1 million.“We’re so far behind,” he said. “We’ve lost some very large accounts.”Mr. Doyle acknowledges that the work can leave blisters and an aching back. “It’s a hard job,” he said on a day when the temperature trudged past 100 degrees. “It’s hot outside. They’re digging holes for sprinklers or trees, laying sod and lifting heavy items.”Under the H-2B visa program that Mr. Doyle and Mr. Holt rely on, the number of seasonal foreign workers is ordinarily capped at 66,000 a year, split between the winter and summer season. Veteran workers, who returned year after year, used to be exempted from the total, but Congress halted that practice in 2017 as the immigration debate got heated. The next year, the government instituted a lottery system that injected a new layer of uncertainty on top of a frustrating process.“It’s quite the gamble if you’re going to be a viable business,” Mr. Doyle said.Kyan Chase, 15, works at Palace Playland in Old Orchard Beach. Of the labor shortage, he said: “It’s pretty good for me. I can get a job anywhere I want.”Tristan Spinski for The New York TimesPrograms for temporary guest workers have long come under attack from several corners. Labor groups and immigration critics argue that it robs American workers of jobs and depresses wages. And every year, there are disturbing examples in which foreign workers are exploited by employers, cheated out of pay or living in squalid conditions.Many employers counter that people don’t understand the peculiarities of the seasonal labor market and changed attitudes, particularly about manual work.“Fifteen, 20 years ago we were able to get local summer kids in high school or college,” Mr. Holt said. “Those workers are just not there anymore. It’s easier to do other things than hard labor for eight to nine hours a day.”Mr. Doyle spent nearly $30,000 advertising for workers as far away as Nevada and got no response, he said. For the last year, he has had a 20-foot trailer parked outside his office, emblazoned with a sign proclaiming: “NOW HIRING. WALK-INS WELCOME.”“I had two people drop in all year,” he said.Higher wages could encourage more American-born workers to apply to these jobs, said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at the New York University Law School. But he argues that in every labor market, there are difficult, unpleasant, low-paid jobs with no opportunity for advancement — like agricultural work or meatpacking — that are considered less desirable both for economic and for cultural reasons.Some of the attitudes toward jobs, particularly in the service sectors, are changing, he said, but “we haven’t quite understood yet the impact of pandemic.”Temporary guest workers have also gotten entangled in broader and more bitter arguments over immigration. There is a widespread misconception, Mr. Chishti said, that all foreign workers are eager to settle in the United States.“A lot of workers don’t necessarily want to come and live here forever,” he said. “They want to work legally and travel back and forth. Their life in Mexico, for example, may be better than life in a U.S. city.”In the meantime, employers are struggling. Small resort towns often depend on international seasonal workers because their population isn’t sufficient to fill all of the suddenly available slots at hotels, restaurants, ice cream shops or ski slopes that serve the hordes of tourists who appear and then vanish.“We just don’t have enough local workers to be able to support the economy as it needs to be in the summertime,” said Jen Hayes, who is the J-1 visa program liaison for Old Orchard Beach, a coastal town south of Portland, Maine.Workers on J-1 or H-2B visas generally make up about 10 to 14 percent of the seasonal work force in Maine.Tristan Spinski for The New York TimesHistorically, the town has had anywhere from 650 to 740 international student workers in the summer — from countries including Turkey, Romania and Russia — but Ms. Hayes estimated that there were only 125 to 150 as of late July. A meet-and-greet at the start of the summer that typically bustles with activity drew only a handful of people.The labor shortage has forced some businesses to limit their hours or close for an extra day a week.Exorbitant housing costs in vacation-friendly enclaves — whether in the Hamptons, in Ketchum, Idaho, or in Provincetown, Mass. — further shrink the pool of available workers, foreign or domestic.In Maine, where the economy relies heavily on tourism and out-of-state visitors, workers on J-1 or H-2B visas generally make up about 10 to 14 percent of the seasonal work force, said Greg Dugal, the director of government affairs at HospitalityMaine, a trade group.But this year, the state will be lucky to receive half the usual number, Mr. Dugal said, adding that many who were approved for the summer arrived later than usual because of processing delays.“The fact remains that we had a worker shortage prior to the pandemic,” he said, and “we have a worse worker shortage after the pandemic for the same reason and a lot of other reasons.”Patricia Cohen More

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    Utah Farm Draws a Rare Breed: The American Shepherd

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    DIXIE NATIONAL FOREST, Utah — “The object is to keep ’em grazing,” Scott Stubbs said as he looked over the 1,470 ewes and lambs chewing up Castle Valley’s dandelions, clover and grasses. “Get them full, which makes them fat.”Mr. Stubbs, a fifth-generation sheep farmer in southern Utah, did not expect to be giving a hands-on shepherding seminar this summer, but he was stuck. He needed a second experienced herder, and the one who was supposed to arrive in the spring from Peru did not get approval for a special agricultural visa. Now backlogs at some foreign passport offices and American consulates — compounded by the pandemic — were delaying a replacement.That’s why Mr. Stubbs last month ended up hiring Duane Rogers, a type of worker rarer than a blue lamb in these parts: an American-born beginner who was eager to herd sheep.Labor shortages are common this summer, especially in Utah, where the unemployment rate is 2.7 percent. The Marriott in Cedar City did not have enough maids to offer daily housekeeping, and the Denny’s outside of Beaver had a sign on the door asking customers to be patient with a short-handed staff. But the predicament that Mr. Stubbs and farmers like him are facing is of longer standing and more severe.“Nobody wants this type of work,” Mr. Stubbs said of herding and farm labor. And most American-born workers haven’t wanted it in a while — at least at the wages that most farmers say they can afford. That is why more than 200,000 temporary foreign farm workers, mostly from Mexico, were allowed into the United States last year to pick cherries, tomatoes and tobacco or to tend livestock. The number of visas issued has more than tripled since 2011, and it increased in 2020 despite the pandemic, after food and agricultural workers were characterized as part of the essential work force.Mr. Stubbs, 54, started using the agricultural visa program, known as H-2A, eight years ago. Through an agency, he hired a Peruvian, Ronal Leon Parejas, who is still with him.Before then, aside from family members or the occasional high school student who would pitch in for a few weeks, the only people in recent years willing to herd sheep were Native Americans or undocumented immigrants, Mr. Stubbs said. This year, the Navajo herder who had been working for him needed a knee operation. At 68, he probably wouldn’t be coming back.“You put a small flock out, but you can’t get labor,” said Mr. Stubbs, who raises his flock for both wool and meat. “It’s putting a hurt on.”Mr. Stubbs, who was 5 or 6 years old when his grandfather taught him how to move a flock from meadow to creek on the federal forest land where his family has had grazing rights since the 1800s, knows it is a hard and lonely job. His first month herding alone was after eighth grade. “I thought I would die,” he said, even though his mother drove from their farm nearly 20 miles away each day to check on him. “I lost 30 pounds in 30 days.”A herder has to stay with the sheep 24 hours a day through the roughly 10-month period on the open range, in sun and rain, hail and snow, whether temperatures climb toward 100 degrees or drop below zero. The workday begins at sunup and ends at sundown, although there may be nights when you need to help the guard dogs scare off a coyote or a mountain lion. There are no weekends or holidays off.The H-2A program has been criticized for low wages and lack of worker protections. For workers under the visa program, the pay is set by the government, and has increased in recent years. In Utah, it is $1,728 a month plus transportation, room and board. In this case, the room is a 14-by-8-foot sheep wagon that has a bed, a wood-fire stove, a gas grill and a cooler. Mr. Stubbs delivers requested food — eggs, bacon, sandwich meat, bread, potato chips, cookies, soda and cans of chile and corn — every few days, along with water.And that is the deal that Mr. Rogers accepted three weeks ago. “I’m grateful that Scott gave me a chance,” he said.Mr. Rogers prepared dinner in his trailer near the grazing area where he herds sheep.A herder has to stay with the sheep 24 hours a day through the nine-month grazing period.Marty Stubbs, who is training Mr. Rogers, roped a lamb that was showing signs of a possible injury.Mr. Rogers, left, assisted Mr. Stubbs with the injured lamb.Mr. Rogers pulled on his tan leather gloves. “I love being in the mountains, and I don’t mind being alone,” he said. His wife, whom he met a few years ago on Western Match, an online dating service for cowboys and “country folk,” lives in South Texas with his stepson and two step-granddaughters. He arrived in Utah with five dogs and his father’s old saddle.At 58, Mr. Rogers has tried his hand at various jobs. He grew up in Hayden, Colo., where his father owned a small farm and raised some cattle and sheep. He served in the military for 12 years and did a tour in Panama before joining the National Guard. In addition to herding cattle and working as a ranch hand, he has driven trucks, maintained highways, worked in construction, plowed snow and guarded women and children who had been arrested at the border and locked up in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers — a job he said he hated because of the conditions.During a long rehabilitation after a truck wreck in 2017, Mr. Rogers said, he spent a lot of time thinking about what he wanted to do. He had looked after small flocks of sheep in enclosed areas, but the idea of working a large open-range herd had always exerted a magnetic pull. He was fascinated by the nomadic life, and had watched dozens of documentaries about it. And he was excited to train his dogs to herd sheep.He was unemployed when he saw the advertisement on the state’s job listing site and applied.“I like cattle, but sheep are a lot more entertaining,” and a lot smarter than people give them credit for, he said. “The lambs do some of the funniest things. In the morning, when they’re feeling good, they’ll climb up on the rocks and play king of the mountain.”The sheep were offering a symphony of guttural bleats punctuated with hollow tongs from bells dangling round their necks as Mr. Rogers and the dogs directed them toward a noonday water break. As the ewes and lambs shuffled forward, they kicked up swarms of grasshoppers that can strip a green field faster than any herd. It is one of several travails plaguing Western farmers this season, along with extreme heat and a prolonged drought that are shrinking harvests and killing off grazing land.The delay in hiring a second herder provided Mr. Stubbs with another challenge. Because he had no one to take the sheep to graze, he had to keep them on the farm, feeding them bales of hay he might otherwise have sold.Over the past few weeks, his son Marty has been helping train Mr. Rogers to herd, so he has not been around to help his father with farm work or tend to his own sheepshearing business. There are many days, Mr. Stubbs said, when he and his teenage daughter ended up working till midnight.One morning, Marty Stubbs caught sight of a small white lamb that wasn’t using his hind left leg. He rode after him, threw up a loop of rope and in a single swing lassoed his back legs. He jumped off a chestnut horse named Trigger and held down the lamb, pushing his left knee against the animal’s stomach. He examined the hind hoof, poking with a knife to loosen a stuck rock or thorn.Mr. Rogers took a brown bottle of penicillin and a large syringe out of his saddle bag.“How many CC’s you want?” he asked.“Six,” Marty replied.He closed his knife, took the needle and jabbed it into the lamb’s hindquarter and then marked the animal’s back with an orange line in chalk. He lifted his knee, and the lamb hobbled away.“If you know where they’re going, it’s OK,” Marty said of keeping track of the sheep. “The problem is if you don’t know where they are and you have to find them.”Knowing where the flock is likely to head, though, is something that only comes through experience. Mr. Parejas said it wasn’t until his fourth year that he felt truly comfortable.His herd was about 10 miles east of Mr. Rogers’s, and he was getting ready to move them across Highway 143, through thick clusters of pinyon pine and juniper, spruce and white quaking aspens, up Haycock Mountain. As the sheep fanned out across the road — they have the right of way — lines of cars and trucks backed up on either side of the double yellow line, their passengers alternately irritated and enchanted by the woolly procession.Sheep herded by Ronal Leon Parejas, a Peruvian herder, crossed Highway 143. Mr. Parejas, left, has not been able to return to Peru to visit his 4-year-old son since February 2020, before the pandemic hit.“It’s very hard and very lonely,” he said through a translator. “I miss my family.”Juan Arredondo for The New York TimesFor Mr. Rogers, left, the idea of working a large open-range herd has always exerted a magnetic pull. Mr. Parejas, 32, has not been able to return to his own small farm in Peru or his 4-year-old son since February 2020, before the pandemic hit. He hopes to visit in December, when the season ends, as long as it doesn’t interfere with his efforts to get a green card — a prize that would enable him to work and live in the United States without restrictions.“It’s very hard and very lonely,” he said through a translator. “I miss my family.” Still, it is better now than during his first couple of years, when he lacked a cellphone with WhatsApp and Facebook to keep in touch.He remembers his first night trying to sleep in the desert, when he heard a coyote howl. “I almost cried,” Mr. Parejas said.Now he is trying to help his nephew get an H-2A visa so he can also work for Mr. Stubbs. He said that he could probably earn as much if not more an hour in Peru, but that getting an employer back home to pay what he owes can be a trial. Working here delivers a dependable paycheck, he said.Mr. Rogers, too, appreciates the reliable paychecks and the fact that he has no expenses during the season and can bank his entire wage. He hopes to start paying down a large debt.Even so, he says that for him, the earnings are secondary. “Money isn’t everything, living is everything,” he said. “All you leave behind is your story, and this is a good story to tell my grandkids.” More

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    The Luckiest Workers in America? Teenagers.

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    Teens are picking up jobs — and higher wages — as companies scramble to hire. But that trend could have a downside.Roller-coaster operators and lemonade slingers at Kennywood amusement park, a Pittsburgh summer staple, won’t have to buy their own uniforms this year. Those with a high school diploma will also earn $13 as a starting wage — up from $9 last year — and new hires are receiving free season passes for themselves and their families. More

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    Luring Labor as a Beach Economy Booms

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    REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — Dogfish Head Craft Brewery is struggling to hire manufacturing workers for its beer factory and staff members for its restaurants in this coastal area, a shortage that has grown so acute that the company has cut dining room hours and is now offering vintage cases of its 120 Minute India Pale Ale as a signing bonus to new hires.The company is using its hefty social media presence “to get the bat signal out” and “entice beverage-loving adults” to join the team, Sam Calagione, the company’s founder, said on a steamy afternoon this month at Dogfish’s brewpub, which was already doing brisk business ahead of vacation season.Economic activity is expected to surge in Delaware and across the country as people who missed 2020 getaways head for vacations and the newly vaccinated spend savings amassed during months at home.Yet as they race to hire before an expected summertime economic boom, employers are voicing a complaint that is echoing all the way to the White House: They cannot find enough workers to fill their open positions and meet the rising customer demand.An April labor market report underscored those concerns. Economists expected companies to hire one million people, but data released on Friday showed that they had added only 266,000, even as vaccines became widely available and state and local economies began springing back to life. Many analysts thought labor shortages might explain the disappointment.Some blame expanded unemployment benefits, which are giving an extra $300 per week through September, for keeping workers at home and hiring at bay. Republican governors in Arkansas, Montana and South Carolina moved last week to end the additional benefits for unemployed workers in their states, citing companies’ labor struggles.President Biden said on Monday that there was no evidence that the benefit was chilling hiring. In remarks at the White House, he said his administration would make clear that any worker who turned down a suitable job offer, with rare exceptions for health concerns related to the coronavirus, would lose access to unemployment benefits. But school closings, child care constraints and incomplete vaccine coverage were playing a larger role in constraining hiring, the president said.He called on companies to step up by helping workers gain access to vaccines and increasing pay. “We also need to recognize that people will come back to work if they’re paid a decent wage,” Mr. Biden said.In tourist spots like Rehoboth Beach, companies face a shortage of seasonal immigrants, a holdover from a ban enacted last year that has since expired. But the behavior of the area’s businesses, from breweries to the boardwalk, suggests that much of the labor shortage also owes to the simple reality that it is not easy for many businesses simultaneously to go from a standstill to an economic sprint — especially when employers are not sure the new boom will last.Many managers are unwilling to raise wages and prices enough to keep up, as they worry that demand will ebb in a few months and leave them with permanently higher payroll costs. They are instead resorting to short-term fixes, like cutting hours, instituting sales quotas and offering signing bonuses to get people in the door.Some employers in the Rehoboth area, which The New York Times visited last year to take the temperature of the labor market, think workers will come flooding back in September, when the more generous unemployment benefits expire.At least 10 people in and around Rehoboth, managers and workers alike, cited expanded payments as a key driver of the labor shortage, though only two of them personally knew someone who was declining to work to claim the benefit.“Some of them are scared of the coronavirus,” said Alan Bergmann, a resident who said he knew six or seven people who were forgoing work. Mr. Bergmann, 37, was unable to successfully claim benefits because the state authorities said he had earned too little in either Delaware or Pennsylvania — where he was living in the months before the pandemic — to qualify.Whether it is unemployment insurance, lack of child care or fear of infection that is keeping people home, the perception that the job market is hot is at odds with overall labor numbers. Nationally, payroll employment was down 8.2 million compared with its prepandemic level, and unemployment remained elevated at 6.1 percent in April. Dogfish Head Craft Brewery is struggling to hire manufacturing workers for its beer factory and staff members for its restaurants.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesSam Calagione, center, the founder of Dogfish Head, said he did not want to think about the business the company would forgo if it cannot hire dozens of employees by the peak summer season.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesIn Delaware, Wawa gas stations sport huge periwinkle blue signs advertising $500 signing bonuses, plus free “shorti” hoagies each shift for new associates. A local country club is offering referral bonuses and opening up jobs to members’ children and grandchildren. A regional home builder has instituted a cap on the number of houses it can sell each month as everything — open lots, available materials, building crews — comes up short.“Demand was always going to pick up faster than supply in a lot of these pandemic-hit parts of the economy,” said Nick Bunker, an economist at Indeed. “There are readjustment costs.”National data hint that it is taking time for workers to reshuffle into new jobs. Openings have been swiftly increasing — a record share of small business owners report having an opening they are trying to fill — and quit rates have rebounded since last year, suggesting that workers have more options.Mr. Bergmann is among those who are benefiting. He said he had a felony on his record, and between that and the coronavirus, he was unable to find work last year. He struggled to survive with no income, cycling in and out of homelessness. Now he works a $16-an-hour job selling shirts on the boardwalk and has been making good money as a handyman for the past three months, enough to rent a room.Brittany Resendes, 18, a server at the Thompson Island Brewing Company in Rehoboth Beach, took unemployment insurance temporarily after being furloughed in March 2020. But she came back to work in June, even though it meant earning less than she would have with the extra $600 top-up available last year.“I was just ready to get back to work,” she said. “I missed it.”She has since been promoted to waitress and is now earning more than she would if she were still at home claiming the $300 expanded benefit. She plans to serve until she leaves for the University of Delaware in August, and then return during school breaks.Scott Kammerer oversees a local hospitality company that includes the brewery where Ms. Resendes works, along with restaurants like Matt’s Fish Camp, Bluecoast and Catch 54. He has been able to staff adequately by offering benefits and taking advantage of the fact that he retained some workers since his restaurants did not close fully or for very long during the pandemic.But he has also bolstered wages. The company’s starting non-tip pay rates have climbed to $12 from $9 two years ago. Mr. Kammerer has not been forced to raise prices to cover increasing costs, because business volume has picked up so much — up 40 percent this year compared with a typical winter — that profits remain solid.Other employers are struggling more. By the end of April, the Peninsula Golf and Country Club usually hired about 100 seasonal workers over the course of three job fairs. This year, after five fairs, it managed to hire only 40. Missing are the 20 or so students from abroad who would usually work on seasonal visas, but the club also cannot get people to come in for interviews.The clubhouse restaurant at the Peninsula Golf and Country Club in Millsboro, Del., sits empty because the company does not have the staff to open it for lunch.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThe club might have to keep the snack shack at its wave pool closed this summer because of the labor shortage.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesBesides relaxing hiring rules and offering bonuses for employee referrals, the club is paying 10 percent to 20 percent more, depending on job title. But managers there do not think the wage increases sweeping their region are sustainable, nor do they think pay is what is keeping people from applying.“There’s no labor out there,” said Greg Tobias, the principal for Ocean Atlantic Companies, a business group that includes real estate development and the country club. “It’s not even a question of, are you paying enough money?”The sprawling clubhouse restaurant was empty on a sunny afternoon this month as golfers milled about. The company does not have the staff to open it for lunch. It might have to keep the snack shack at the club’s wave pool closed this summer if it cannot find more workers.Part of the problem, Mr. Tobias said, was that people had left the hospitality industry for the thriving local construction business. Ocean Atlantic’s related building company, Schell Brothers, had sales take off over the past year as people moved toward the beach — either because they were retiring or because the pandemic had prompted them to look for more space. Schell Brothers’s subcontractors could not double the sizes of its work forces overnight, and the company was concerned about running out of finished lots. Builders ran into material shortages.The company first raised prices by 15 percent to 25 percent to try to cool things down, but when the building backlog hit 18 months, it instituted caps to slow the rush of sales.“It’s almost like, anticapitalistic practices, but what would happen to our companies or employees if we ran out of finished lots would be worse,” said Preston Schell, the co-founder and chief executive of Ocean Atlantic Companies. While they could have pushed prices as high as demand would allow, they opted not to; it is hard to cut home prices down the road, Mr. Schell said, so it is better to undercharge during what he expects to be a short-term run-up.Building homes in Millsboro, Del. People have left the hospitality industry for the thriving local construction business, said Greg Tobias, the principal for Ocean Atlantic Companies.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesSales took off over the past year as people moved toward the beach, either because they were retiring or because the pandemic had prompted them to look for more space. Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesSuch maneuvering could matter for economic policymakers from the White House to the Fed, as they keep a careful eye on inflation while vaccine-induced optimism and trillions in government spending fuel an economic rebound. If many businesses treat the summer bounce as likely to be short lived, it may keep price gains in check.At Dogfish Head, the solution has been to also temporarily limit what is on offer. The Rehoboth brewpub has cut its lunches, and its sister restaurant next door is closed on Mondays. Mr. Calagione said he did not want to think about the business they would forgo if they cannot hire the dozens of employees needed by the peak summer season.But as it offers cases of its cult-favorite beer and signing bonuses to draw new hires, the company seems less focused on another lever: lasting pay bumps. Steve Cannon, a server at Dogfish Head, can walk to what he regards as his retirement job. He said he was not thinking of switching employers, but several co-workers had left recently for better wages elsewhere.“There’s nobody,” said Mr. Cannon, 57. “So people are going to start throwing money at them.”When asked if it was raising pay, Dogfish Head said it offered competitive wages for the area. 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