FROM THE EDITOR: Virginia Governor Celebrates Jobs, Acknowledges Pain, and Omits an Important Part of the Story
Youngkin attended an event at SimVentions on Friday afternoon to celebrate 250,000 jobs profiled on the state website, and to sympathize with those who are going through "disruption."
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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“Virginia has jobs,” Gov. Glenn Youngkin said joyfully at SimVentions on Friday afternoon, “lots of jobs.”
That’s the good news.
The bad news, Youngkin said, is that “we have to restore fiscal responsibility back to Washington. And the reality is that process, by definition, is disruptive.”
It’s a tone that he’s struck in a series of events across Virginia in recent weeks. At SimVentions, he talked about his own personal experience with job loss.
“My father lost his job twice,” he said, “it’s tough on families.” The first time his family had to move from Richmond to Virginia Beach. Three years later, his father lost his job again, “and we went through it again. So I have an extraordinary amount of empathy for the anxiety, the fear, and yes, the real financial challenges that are in front of a lot of Virginians.”
He continued, “So how do we meet these people who need help? We meet them with opportunity.”
He segued from there to a celebration of VirginiaHasJobs.com. “It’s so much more than a website,” he said.
He stressed that visitors could find three important resources:
Help filing unemployment benefits and help understanding how to keep healthcare coverage
250,000+ jobs all over Virginia. Just under half require a bachelor’s degree or more, and the other half require “real skills.”
Support infrastructure to help people journey to new jobs, like training at community colleges for credentials, certificate programs, and state and local resources to help people navigate a job transition.
Youngkin credits much of this opportunity to his policies since becoming governor. He noted that under his tenure companies have poured in, bringing $100 Billion in investments. There are 260,000 more people working today than there were three years ago, and for the fourth straight year the state is running a surplus — a total of $10 Billion. And his administration has ushered in record investments in public education.
The challenges facing the Commonwealth, however, will extend beyond helping those in the federal government who lose their jobs.
For example, proposed threats to funding school lunches mean that poorer school districts like Fredericksburg and Caroline County face the very real prospect of losing the funding that provides free meals for each of their students twice a day.
Funding cuts will also mean the loss of contractors’ jobs and the jobs of nonprofit workers. Already, we’ve seen nonprofits in Virginia facing very difficult decisions as federal funding has been cut.
The most interesting part of Youngkin’s talk today, however, was his mention of Virginia’s population growth. “In 2023,” he said, “for the first time in over a decade, we had more people move to Virginia than away.”
He continued, noting that Virginia is in the Top 10 of states to live work and raise a family. “It’s a spectacular place to find a job.”
He was suggesting that it was jobs bringing people to Virginia. This is certainly part of the story, but not the whole story.
For it’s not necessarily high-paying white-collar workers who have been flooding into the state since 2023.
It’s immigrants.
Dwayne Yancey at Cardinal News described what is happening in a December 2024 article.
“Yes, Virginia is now seeing more Americans move in than move out [of Virginia], but those are relatively modest numbers. The real driver of Virginia’s population growth is international. About three-quarters of Virginia’s population growth over the past year came from immigration.”
He continued:
“In 2020, immigration accounted for 12.3% of Virginia's population growth. Last year, it accounted for 73.3% of Virginia's population growth.”
In short, the same people that the Trump Administration is actively working to drive out of Virginia and of the nation is the very group that is driving the population growth in Virginia. And this growth, as Yancey explains, has a profound positive influence on our economy.
Virginians, and the governor, have reason to celebrate our strong economy and job market. However, as even the governor admitted, it’s too early to really know how the turmoil in Washington is going to affect the commonwealth’s economy. He noted that only about 1,000 federal workers have filed for unemployment in Virginia, but said he expects “many more.”
The transition we are undergoing is more transformational than people simply leaving federal employment and accepting state, local, or private jobs. This transition will affect every corner of life in the state. To what extent is simply impossible to predict at the moment.
One real concern for the governor and Virginia is that if deportation continues to accelerate, we may end up driving out the very people who are responsible for growing the population, and the economy, that Youngkin was celebrating today.
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