I.Z., 28, (whose full name is being withheld because he is undocumented) crossed the desert from Honduras to the U.S. at age 15, only to get duped out of his wages. As a construction worker in Pittsburgh he does bricklaying, drywalling and painting. But a year ago, an employer refused to pay his salary.
“They say the work is badly done, but that’s an excuse not to pay,” he said of one of his employers who held back over $10,000 in wages, according to a complaint he filed in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas.
Wage theft is one of the many difficulties that immigrants face when looking for a job in the U.S., notes Laura Perkins, human rights advocate at Latino resource center Casa San Jose, in Beechview. Language and paperwork are other barriers. But employers still come to her for workers, underscoring the shortage of workers in the region that immigrants can help fill.
Labor groups routinely come to Perkins looking for workers to take on roofing and drywalling. “We need people,” they say, “do you know of anyone?”
“A lot of talent is coming to the region, and we need them desperately,” said Carey Harris, CEO at Literacy Pittsburgh, “for the worker shortage and just to help our community become more vibrant.”
Allegheny County is in need of workers, according to an Allegheny Conference on Community Development report released in March. The aging population and tight labor market — meaning there are more jobs than workers to fill them — mirrors a national trend that is magnified in the Pittsburgh region. With immigration on the rise locally, new arrivals from Afghanistan, Haiti and Venezuela may be poised to fill jobs in entry-level positions — that is, if they can overcome the barriers first.
No car? Company hosts a shuttle to help fill open jobs
LSG Sky Chefs is one of many hospitality businesses looking to hire in the region. Immigrants have helped meet their demand for workers.
“We have a lot of Afghan employees here,” said Yesabeth Martinez, human resources coordinator at LSG Sky Chefs.
The pandemic of 2020 paralyzed airline services globally. For airline catering company Sky Chefs, jobs came back as the virus receded, but workers didn’t. In June 2024, Sky Chefs had 32 open Pittsburgh-area positions in food production, sanitation and driving. Prior to 2020, they had close to none.
“After COVID, that’s when we experienced the same challenges as other businesses where people weren’t really looking forward to coming back to work,” said Martinez.
To help fill open slots, they decided to run a shuttle bus, which carries up to 30 employees from Sky Chefs’ retail sector to and from work at the Pittsburgh International Airport. Many onboard are Afghan and Nepali immigrants, which have helped bring open positions at Sky Chefs down to 10.
Some immigrant workers are referred to LSG by the Jewish Family Community Services [JFCS] career center.
“An employer who’s willing to help get a shuttle system in place to get workers to their facility, that can go a long way in helping to build a strong workforce that’s going to show up every day,” said Rebecca Johnson, director of career services at Jewish Family Community Services [JFCS], who helped connect immigrants and refugees with work at LSG Sky Chefs.
Language is the biggest hurdle for immigrant workers
For Habibullah Arab, an Afghan refugee who arrived in April of last year, finding work wasn’t hard, but English was.
“It’s very, very hard actually,” said Arab, using an interpreter. “Even if you were to find a job and you go to the job, you would not be able to talk to anyone.”
That did not stop Arab from getting a job in the machine department at Allegheny Performance Plastics. After a few job trainings, which he navigated with help from Google Translate, he now requires minimal on-the-job supervision.
“I do know a little bit [of English], enough to know if they ask me to do a job I can get it done,” he said.
“Our major difficulty was that we didn’t know the language and that we didn’t know the area or the city well.”
Habibullah Arab
Sloane Davidson, CEO at Hello Neighbor, an organization that helps refugees resettle in and around Pittsburgh, believes all employers should have a language access policy.
“That helps to understand when to bring an interpreter in,” said Davidson, “what documents we need to have translated, and what English level people really need to have.”
In Kabul, Afghanistan, Arab worked as a chef at the American Embassy. But after the Taliban’s resurgence in 2021 and the departure of the U.S. and allies, his life and those of his family of nine were at risk. The Taliban “has techniques to know who is who and where they’ve worked and we worked with Americans,” Arab said. He left for America on a special immigration visa given to Afghans, and chose Pittsburgh after his friend said that his first choice, Washington state, was too costly.
“Our major difficulty was that we didn’t know the language and that we didn’t know the area or the city well,” said Arab.
At JFCS, Johnson noted that immigrants with a high level of English might be easier to place in jobs than those without. She said language contributes to a “mismatch” between open jobs and those who are available to fill them, particularly in front-facing roles in health care and education, Pittsburgh’s two largest economic sectors.
This could be solved with employer-led English as a second language classes.
“Some employers will have us come in and teach people on the job language relevant to their work, which we can do,” said Harris, of Literacy Pittsburgh. They have worked with UPMC and Allegheny Health Network, among other employers.
School transcripts hard to come by
In other cases the challenge is proving or transferring credentials in the American job market. Obtaining a credential from a country in peril is no easy feat, presenting another barrier for immigrant job seekers.
“Do you know how hard it is to get a copy of a diploma from a high school in Afghanistan right now?” said Johnson.
Katia Nerette Apollon, a Haitian native who came to Pittsburgh in 2021 and works as a nursing assistant at UPMC, applied to become a registered nurse at the UPMC Schools of Nursing, a role which could double her current salary. But Apollon worries she won’t get in because she doesn’t have a copy of her high school diploma.
“They wanted to see I had taken chemistry and biology,” said Apollon, who has a master’s degree in business from the University of Moncton in Canada. “I already had this class in Haiti, but in Haiti there is chaos now, so I can’t have my high school credentials evaluated.”
Haiti is currently facing turmoil amid increased violence, collapsing many essential services.
In the health care industry, where employment surged after the pandemic, regional jobs continue to grow. In Allegheny County, the need for care work is acute, with its aging population at 20% over age 65.
“We’re talking about this huge need for population growth and we have immigrants who are looking for places to live and work,” said Julio Rodriguez, political director at Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition [PICC].
Navigating the immigration system
Rodchild Clerfe, originally from Haiti, has spent 30 years in Pittsburgh and is now on his way to become a naturalized citizen. Yet he still finds the immigration system difficult to navigate, particularly for Creole speakers.
“Whenever you go to those offices, it’s really hard to find somebody who knows how to speak Creole,” said Clerfe. “Most likely you may find somebody who knows how to speak Spanish. But it’s difficult to find somebody who knows how to speak Creole.”
He recently applied for a job as a bilingual clerical assistant fluent in Creole with the state and hopes to help people who may not speak the language navigate the legal documentation process.
For undocumented immigrants applying for asylum — a status which entitles them to work permits after 150 days of filing — the process can be convoluted, said Perkins, particularly if you do not know English. When demand is high, pro-bono attorneys who help translate and compile paperwork for work permits are scarce.
“So you’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said Perkins. “Because how do you make money to pay an attorney to help you submit your asylum application?”
This can quickly turn into a vicious cycle that renders immigrants vulnerable to wage theft and workplace safety violations. Workers without permits are more likely to experience wage theft, based on an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity.
Undocumented immigrants typically find jobs in the sectors of cleaning, construction and restaurant work, where wage theft is common, according to Perkins.
I.Z. who supports his parents in Honduras with the money from his construction work, recently sued an employer to recover thousands of dollars in stolen wages. But as an undocumented worker, it was fear and not protection he felt as the plaintiff in the case, which he won when the employer didn’t show up.
“When you sue someone who has papers and you don’t, you feel unsafe,” he said.
Pittsburgh aims to welcome immigrants
Former Mayor Bill Peduto opened doors for immigrants with Welcoming Pittsburgh, an immigrant, refugee and asylee integration strategy his office launched in 2014, and which current Mayor Ed Gainey continues. In 2023 Gainey and five other Pennsylvania mayors sent a letter to President Biden asking for protection of immigrants in “legal limbo.”
In 2019 immigrants made up 9.2% of the Pittsburgh workforce and contributed $95 million in state and local taxes, according to research by the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit that welcomes immigration.
The number of Latino immigrants helped into the workforce by Pittsburgh Hispanic Development Corporation [PHDC] rose from 150 in 2022 to 689 in 2023, according to Guillermo Velazquez, the organization’s executive director (and a PublicSource board member). Qualifying Venezuelans were granted temporary protected status extensions last year, which protected them from removal and allowed them to work in the U.S.
“There’s actually more demand than workers that we have available,” said Velazquez, who launched the employment initiative there in 2019. “I’m not just saying in a specific industry, I’m saying all across, in cleaning, in food, in construction, there seems to be always a need for more workers.”
Not there yet
Although the number of immigrants in Pittsburgh is rising, they remain a comparatively small share of the regional population and well below the national average. The city’s population decline also straps job growth, further deterring immigrants.
“As you have population contraction, you have job destruction,” said Chris Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research [UCSUR]. Slow job growth also makes it harder to attract workers, both immigrant and local, he said.
Allegheny County’s population fell from more than 1.6 million in 1960 to around 1.2 million in 2020. For years it was the only large metropolitan area with a natural population decline, meaning more deaths each year than births, according to Briem.
Immigrants could help counter some of the decline. Pittsburgh’s population loss of 1.3% from 2014 to 2019 would have been almost double that level if it weren’t for immigrant arrivals, according to an American Immigration Council analysis.
While “help wanted” signs go up in current businesses, new jobs fail to sprout. In the last year, there was only a 1% growth in total non-farm jobs added in the Pittsburgh MSA.
“That 1% is small,” said Frank Gamrat, executive director of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy.
Lagging labor force participation, compared to national rates, has kept jobs open for longer. “We’re seeing a lot of jobs go unfilled,” said Gamrat. “You’re seeing a lot of wanted signs, especially at the retail level, leisure and hospitality.”
“There is certainly a smaller labor force in Pittsburgh than there was at the beginning of 2019, and that’s not what we’re seeing around the country on average,” said Brian Kovack, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.
Some growth sectors are education and health services, which added 11,300 jobs last year, followed by leisure & hospitality with 4,500 jobs, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry data. But some roles in the leisure and hospitality sector go unfilled, according to Gamrat.
“People still want to go out to eat. It’s just, it’s a little tougher to find a place that is fully staffed to accommodate the demand,” said Gamrat.
Could immigrants fill these roles?
“You know what, I hope so, and the reason I say this is we’re not even back to pre-pandemic levels and it’s just a matter of people, from what I’ve seen,” said Gamrat.
Laura Turbay is an editorial intern at PublicSource and can be reached at laura@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Briana Bindus.
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