Charles Crane/MDN Paige Kuntz, global global talent coordinator with the North Dakota Department of Commerce’s Office of Legal Immigration, speaks at the Minot Area Chamber EDC Workforce Summit at the Minot Area Workforce Academy on Tuesday, explaining available programs to attract foreign-born professionals to the North Dakota workforce.

Experts spoke on a number of issues from the availability of childcare, and available resources and programs to attract and recruit job seekers during a workforce summit on Tuesday. The Minot Area Chamber EDC held the summit at the Minot Area Workforce Academy.

Paige Kuntz, global talent coordinator with the North Dakota Department of Commerce’s Department of Legal Immigration (DLI), provided during her presentation a number of available solutions to recruit foreign born professionals

DLI was created by the North Dakota Legislature in 2023 to address labor shortages in the state. Kuntz said despite its name, DLI is not involved in immigration enforcement, and rather is focused entirely on filling the many available jobs in the North Dakota workforce.

Kuntz said North Dakota is one of 20 states in the country to open a DLI office, but the state has received a lot of recognition for its pragmatic approach to recruiting immigrant workers.

“We’re in commerce, and we’re focused on the workforce. Some of our peer states are kind of lost dealing with the people who are already there. We’re trying to focus on building infrastructure before we say, ‘Come and work here.’ We’re operating more forward thinking, they’re operating in a crisis mode,” Kuntz said. “We need people and there aren’t enough people here. So we need to find a way to bring people here and retain them. Keeping people here is extremely important.”

Kuntz said North Dakota’s labor shortages are not unique to the state, but are being acutely felt nationwide as domestic birth rates decline. The objectives of the DLI are focused on developing and implementing a statewide strategy to recruit and retain labor from around the world through educating employers and other institutions like universities of potential resources and recruitment pipelines.

“North Dakota is usually in the top three for the most severe labor shortage in the country. We’re not surprised, I think everyone knows that. What is so different is that the United States as a whole is very short labor like the other high earning countries around the world like Canada, Japan and Germany. They all have the same issue. There aren’t enough youths being born in the country to fill the jobs and grow the economy,” Kuntz said. “We’re trying to look at how we can move labor from around the world to North Dakota.”

Kuntz said federal regulations, which haven’t been updated since 1986, have become “pretty outdated,” falling behind peers like Canada and Japan. That said, Kuntz said there were a number available avenues that her office has determined are underutilized which could be used to welcome foreign-born professionals and labor to the state.

The four groups the DLI is targeting for recruitment include international workers immigrating to the United States, secondary migrants like refugees or asylum seekers, and international students graduating from state universities. While international workers in agriculture are fairly common in North Dakota, Kuntz said certain visas could be used to recruit nurses, doctors and other professionals.

“We hope North Dakota may become a destination for internationally trained professionals. I think that most people have had an Uber driver who was like a physician in their home country but are living in Orlando and can’t practice because of the barriers. So how can we if not reduce the barriers but make it easier to transition those international credentials to North Dakota so they can use them at their full scope?” Kuntz said.

Retaining international students was one pipeline Kuntz put particular emphasis on, as many graduates have reached out relating their struggle with finding employers to sponsor them. Kuntz felt students and their universities should begin seeking sponsorship before the student has graduated to lay the groundwork for their placement within the state workforce.

“We want to make sure we are keeping those now adult professionals in our state. I’ve talked to universities and one of the comments they made was, ‘Our students have no problem getting placed even if it’s in California or some place like that.’ What if, crazy thought, we tried to keep them in North Dakota, the state they chose to get educated in the first place, and have friends and a life. We just want to close that gap a bit,” Kuntz said.

Kuntz said one underutilized visa was the E3 pathway, which is given specifically to Australian nationals of which only 5,000 of the available 10,500 visas are awarded every year. Kuntz said E3 visas could be used to attract nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, teachers, engineers, software developers, and IT workers. Kuntz said the recruitment of Australian talent has a number of built in positives, as they are English speaking, there is alignment with their credentials like the NCLEX exam for nurses, and is much cheaper than the traditional H1B visa.

“It is just kind of learning those little caveats that we would never know if we didn’t have an office like ours. I think the value we can bring is connecting employers and communities to the resources themselves,” Kuntz said. “Immigration can be such a divisive topic, but in the end its about getting people to come here legally to fill jobs and make a life. I don’t think it’s anything different than a hundred years ago when people were setting North Dakota.”