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Area businesses seek solutions to employee void

Plans could include refugee recruitment, resettlement

By Kevin Limiti • Special to www.AllOTSEGO.com

A possible solution to worker shortages in Otsego County could be employing refugees and resettling them in Otsego County communities, some local leaders suggest.

Al Rubin, CEO of the Otsego County Chamber of Commerce, and Tom Armao of the Country Club Auto Group, said they are having preliminary discussions in finding ways to alleviate the problem of understaffing and the idea of resettling refugees came up extensively in their conversations.

The Otsego County Chamber of Commerce sponsored a forum July 27 that discussed the issue of worker shortages in the county. Politicians Antonio Delgado, D-19, State Sen. Peter Oberacker, R-Maryland, Assemblyman John Salka, R-Brookfield, and Assemblyman Brian Miller, R-New Hartford, were among the local officials at the forum.

“The consensus of the group was, among other things, we couldn’t get help,” Armao said. “There are 1,000 open jobs within 50 miles of Oneonta. The challenge becomes finding people to fill those jobs. Everywhere you go, there is a help wanted sign.”

Armao brought up the possibility of using immigrants as a way of filling jobs in the area, referencing Chobani, which is a company that has a specific policy of employing refugees as part of their workforce.
Rubin also spoke about the idea of welcoming refugees as a means of dealing with understaffing. “We need more people in our county,” Rubin said, who referred to the Center in Utica as a means of facilitating jobs for refugees.

The Center, a refugee resettlement organization, is a group Rubin said he would like to see doing work in Otsego County.

“A lot of workers are coming from there to surrounding areas,” Rubin said. “So why wouldn’t we want them to come here?”

Between 2016 and 2017, a group was formed in order to resettle refugees into the Oneonta community. Temple Bethel, Red Door Church and the First United Methodist Church were among the participants, who wanted to copy the model that Utica had with the Center.

The Center, formerly the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees, was established in the 1970s to help resettle refugees from the Vietnam War. Throughout the group’s history, it has been involved in resettling people fleeing conflict, including those from Bosnia and Yugoslavia in the 1990s and Burmese populations fleeing Myanmar in modern times.

Utica at the time had a positive relationship with refugees seeking work and new lives. A Cooperstown Central School extra-curricular club even made an award-winning film about the city, “Utica: A Town That Loves Refugees.”

However, during the Trump administration, the amount of immigrants and refugees fell drastically and the Oneonta group disbanded.

To bring workers to the area, other factors to consider include housing, social services and, fittingly, employment. Otsego County would have to demonstrate it can meet the needs of new residents for the plan to work, Rubin and Armao said.

Debra Marcus, CEO of Family Planning in Oneonta, was part of some of the original group that hoped to follow the Utica model in resettling refugees. A granddaughter of immigrants who escaped Russia during the pogrom, a systemic killing of Jewish people, Marcus said she would like to see Oneonta follow Utica’s example.

“Look how the old city of Utica was energized and invigorated by people who wanted to work and bring their ideas and their enthusiasm,” Marcus said. “This would be such a win-win for not just refugees but for the entire community.”

Marcus said she was putting everything in place and was working with the Center but when Trump came into power, those hopes were dashed as even Utica experienced a drop in the amount of refugees being resettled there.

Utica was experiencing a downward trend in population until the Center came into existence. It is considered a successful organization in terms of resettling refugees and touts on its website its successes in stabilizing the city’s population and improving the local economy.

“Shouldn’t we be welcoming people? Aren’t we a nation of refugees? We should be doing that in Otsego County,” Marcus said

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1 Comment

  1. There are several weaknesses to the above editorial. Principally, the nomenclature “resettling” used above does not always coincide with “integration.” Large differences in cultural norms can often manifest as conflict between the local communities and those “resettled” and/or an under-appreciation/misunderstanding of local laws and norms by the latter group. You can pontificate all day on the merits of being welcoming and inclusive but the truth is that the mass infusion of vastly different cultural populations almost always bears more burden on the local populace than can be tolerated.
    This is not an effective solution to worker shortages as it will simply generate new challenges to the local area. This is a progressively liberal solution to a problem that is caused largely by overreaching government programs and an erosion of American hard-working values.

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