Even amid the global pandemic, Idaho’s unemployment rate has been hovering around 3%. In the capital city, Boise, for-hire signs are posted at grocery stores, restaurants, and at Pete Amador’s home health care agency.

His latest ad even offers a thousand dollar signing bonus. Amador could easily hire 50 more people right now, if they would apply. There is a long wait list of elderly clients.

“People are calling hourly asking for help,” he says.

About 70% of Amador’s caregivers are refugees. He says his business would not be what it is today without them. First of all, locals don’t usually apply for these jobs. As a Medicaid provider, he can only offer around $11 an hour to start. For refugees though, it’s usually their first employment in the U.S. They work hard and want to move up, he says.

“Without the refugees coming in, it has created a shortage for my company and our ability to provide great care to our clients,” Amador says.

President Biden has promised to lift a Trump-era cap on the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States. And there are signs of growing support for refugees in unlikely places: largely rural, conservative states where the former president and his far-right immigration policies were popular.

Idaho, Nebraska and North Dakota often ranked at the top of the nation in per-capita refugee resettlement, before Trump dramatically reduced the annual caps in his first year in office. These states also have some of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation and many employers are pointing to worsening labor shortages.

‘New Era In Resettlement’: U.S. Refugee Advocates Count On More Community-Based Help
For Pete Amador in Boise, this isn’t just an economic crisis, however. It’s also a humanitarian one. He hasn’t liked the dramatic cuts in refugee resettlement.

While demographics are changing, Idaho is still about 82% white. When Amador first started hiring refugees a decade ago, there was skepticism among some of his clients. But that slowly evolved toward acceptance.

“In home care, we’re dealing with elderly people who grew up in a different time with a different understanding, and we need to show a lot of patience and respect for that,” Amador says. “It’s been somewhat of a challenge, but also an honor to help be a part of them transition their way of thinking.”

Refugees in more homogenous, rural areas are often forced to take on dual roles: A day job as an elderly caregiver or grocery clerk or small business owner, while at the same time serving as a cultural ambassador and bridge-builder.

From bathroom cleaner to business owner

This is Bahar Shams’ world. In 2019, she and her sisters opened up an Afghan bakery and specialty coffee and saffron tea shop.

Sunshine Spice Cafe sits along a busy suburban thoroughfare dotted with fast food chains, big box stores and a collection of taco trucks and other newer international groceries and delis.

When they first opened before Christmas of that year, Shams said some in the community complained that they were getting a government handout.

“Because it’s not easy to open a business, especially woman’s, and we’re a refugee from different country,” Shams says. “But when we told our story to them, they accepted us.”

The four sisters and their parents fled Afghanistan and the terror of the Taliban, first to Iran, then eventually through the United Nations refugee agency they were placed in Idaho in 2005.

They’d never heard of Idaho. They spoke no English and the sisters had never even attended school. But Shams says it was a dream of her parents that their daughters would one day be educated.

“Once someone has a passion to do something, language or new country, it doesn’t matter. If you want to do something you will be successful if you work hard on it,” Shams says.

And they did.

The sisters ended up graduating high school and going to Boise State University. Bahar initially wanted to be a filmmaker to tell the stories of Afghan women. That didn’t work out, she says, but she was still passionate about finding a means to support Afghan farmers, especially widowed women, by buying saffron and tea and selling it in the U.S. That plan eventually evolved into the Sunshine Spice Cafe.

Bahar Shams initially didn’t get any loans. Most of it was financed on more than 20 credit cards, which she paid off while working as a cleaner early mornings.

“A few years ago, I was cleaning the bathroom at the store, but now I’m a business owner,” Shams says.