Roman Dimaksyan often gets phone calls from people looking for work. It hurts his construction company, and bothers him, when he has to turn them down.

The business owner and Russian speaker says that other Russian-speaking immigrants looking for work tend to find him and his Omaha business, RabFak Construction, which already employs mostly immigrants. But Dimaksyan says he’s often unable to hire many of the people calling, because they don’t yet have legal authorization to work in the United States.

He could use the help. RabFak is missing out on larger, longer-term projects because he simply doesn’t have enough workers, he said.  

“That really hurts me, and that’s why I’m trying to find out how we can bring more people here,” Dimaksyan said. “We know that talent has meaning, not anything else, talent. … All this talk about anything else is just too much political (talk).”

Dimaksyan isn’t alone in facing shortages. Nebraska has a workforce problem – there are 50,000 jobs open around the state that employers can't fill, a problem more acute in rural Nebraska.

That need has created an unlikely alliance between the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce, ag industry lobbyists, big business executives, small business owners, nonprofits and activists who believe it should be easier to legally immigrate to and work in the United States. They’re pushing federal reforms to improve pathways to permanent residency, to increase the number of immigrant visas, to boost the refugee admissions.

And now they’re watching newly inaugurated President Trump’s immigration crackdown, and wondering what impact it will have on working immigrants, and the Nebraska industries relying on them.

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Nebraskans work at one of the highest rates in the country. In November, Nebraska had an unemployment rate of 2.8%, fifth lowest in the U.S. and nearly 1.5% lower than the national rate.

The state’s 50,000 open jobs include both entry-level work and better-paying positions like attorneys, mechanical engineers and registered nurses, according to the Nebraska Department of Labor.

The shortage is hurting nursing homes – 13 have closed around Nebraska in the past four years in part due to staffing shortages, said Nebraska Health Care Association President and CEO Jalene Carpenter.

It’s hurting the state’s tax coffers, said Bill Lapp, an agricultural economist and president of the Omaha-based consulting firm Advanced Economic Solutions. That money could go toward things like funding roads and schools, he said.

And it’s hurting small and medium-sized businesses like Dimaksyan’s, which struggle to grow because of the worker shortage, said Bryan Slone, president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

“The truth is every industry has this issue in Nebraska right now. We need more doctors, we need more nurses,” Slone said. “We need engineers, we need the trades, we need electricians, we need welders, we need ag workers. We need everything.”

There are many reasons for this worker shortage. Declining birth rates, retiring baby boomers and the “brain drain” of Nebraskans leaving at higher rates than people moving in are all cited in a January 2024 report from the state chamber.

The same report suggests a solution: Increasing immigration.

Immigrants already make up about 10% of Nebraska’s workforce, according to a 2023 estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau, with roughly 100,000 foreign-born workers employed in a state with a total workforce of about 1 million.

They’re heavily involved in industries like manufacturing, where foreign-born workers make up about a quarter of the state’s workforce. They’re also well-represented in Nebraska agriculture, but work across all industries, skill levels and education levels, Slone said.

The diversity of need is represented in the Nebraska Alliance for Thriving Communities, a coalition of over 60 organizations that support federal immigration reform, which includes representatives from unions, businesses, industry associations, law firms, chambers of commerce, city governments and community organizations.

The group is advocating for comprehensive updates to federal immigration policy, including pathways to residency, increasing visas and improving temporary visas.

They also support local and state-level changes to retain and attract people from other countries or from other states: more affordable housing, affordable child care options, improved public transportation and policies that can ease the transition of immigrants, such as improving the transfer of professional certifications.

The Nebraska Pork Producers Association, a state advocacy group for the pork industry, is a member of the alliance. Its president, Al Juhnke, said that immigration reform shouldn’t be a partisan issue.

“We need to get the politics out of it. There is a political bent to it, and we’ve seen that increase over the years,” Juhnke said. “I’m taking calls (from farmers) where they said, ‘Al can’t they just check their backgrounds, make sure they’re not criminals, and somehow get them up to Nebraska legally so we can hire them and they can become part of our workforce and our communities?’ They just don’t understand why we’re sending qualified people away.”

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President Trump limited legal immigration in various ways during his first term, reducing the number of refugees admitted and adding some requirements for temporary worker visas.

Trump has already taken initial actions on several of his campaign promises, signing a flurry of executive orders targeting immigration in his first days back in office.  Some of them, like an order temporarily suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, could lower the number of immigrants here legally. The order argues that the United States has been inundated with record levels of migration, which the country can’t absorb while preserving taxpayer resources for citizens.

Bill Lapp, the Omaha-based ag economist, said that stakeholders will have to wait and see which of Trump’s positions go into effect. He said there didn’t appear to be a consensus within the administration on specific immigration policies, as an example pointing to disagreements between members of Trump’s team on H-1B visas.

“We could be worried about something that doesn’t even come to fruition to a great extent,” Lapp said.

But employers have expressed varying degrees of anxiety about Trump’s potential actions to Amy Peck, co-leader of the immigration practice group for the national law firm Jackson Lewis. They worry about facing legal action, negative publicity or other penalties.

“I would say the range of emotions is maybe from mild concern to abject terror,” Peck said.

Peck said that most businesses try to follow the law, but that compliance with complicated systems could be difficult. She said that business owners were taking precautions prior to Trump’s inauguration. She recommended proactive measures like auditing I-9 employment eligibility systems to make sure that employees provided accurate identification and employment authorization. 

Peck also said that the country could expect to see worksite raids under Trump. Raids are good at sending a message, she said. But they often do more harm than good, she argued.

“Raids are big and flashy and they grab headlines, and it looks like the federal government is doing something about the perceived problem,” Peck said. “It’s essentially spitting in the wind.”

Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, previously called worksite raids “necessary” during a CBS 60 Minutes interview.

In a statement on Tuesday, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen said that he would issue an executive order directing state agencies to cooperate “to the full extent of the law” with federal efforts to enforce immigration laws and apprehend “criminal aliens.”

“I am encouraged by the strength of President Trump’s immigration and border security orders. The state of Nebraska will support these efforts.” Pillen said in the statement.

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In Omaha, Dimaksyan is one of many business owners waiting to see the impact of the potential immigration crackdown. He knows what it’s like to start from scratch in a new country.

Originally from the country of Georgia, Dimaksyan immigrated to the United States in 2015. Out of necessity, he began working in construction as a general laborer, an industry he had no previous experience in.

He practiced carpentry in his garage after his work days as a laborer, learning out of library books and community college manuals. When his second son was born, he made the leap to start RabFak Construction in 2018.

RabFak takes its name from “Rabochiy Fakultet” or “Workers Faculty,” early Soviet institutions founded to provide education for working class people.

“It’s a lot of dirty history there. But the good thing is, the laborer who had no education, maybe they didn’t know how to write or read, but they could go there and learn it after work,” Dimaksyan said.

It’s an idea that Dimaksyan takes to heart. He does volunteer work and helps connect immigrants to training opportunities and other resources to ease their transition to a new life. He’s also experimented with adding more formal training courses for his employees and for other immigrants looking to start working in the United States. In his view, simplifying life for immigrants could help set Nebraska apart from other states.

“I’m part of Nebraska. Me, my wife and my kids, we love this place,” Dimaksyan said. “I understand that there are some laws and rules and maybe traditions, but we can’t stay in one spot in history, we need to move forward.”

The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.