Vermont city hit hard by news of immigration furloughs

ST. ALBANS, Vt. (AP) — Word has spread swiftly around the small working-class city of St. Albans about looming furloughs at its U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services center, the largest employer in the city that just went through layoffs at its hospital.

USCIS has warned that if it doesn’t receive $1.2 billion by Aug. 3, it will be forced to furlough about two-thirds of its workforce of nearly 19,000 people nationally. U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Friday that he had confirmed that the furloughs had been delayed to Aug. 31.

In Vermont, the agency employs about 1,700 workers in several locations and about 1,100 received furlough notices.

“The impact is going to be huge,” said Tim Smith, mayor of the city of about 7,000 people on the Canadian border. “It’s 400, 450 good-paying jobs across the whole spectrum and the trickle-down effect to businesses — buying new cars, going out to eat, all that stuff — we don’t know what that will be but that should be significant, as well.”

Four other major USCIS service centers exist around the country but are in larger areas such as Arlington, Virginia, and Irving, Texas, where the impact may not be so drastic.

The news follows layoffs at Northwestern Medical Center, the second-largest employer, and comes as the dairy industry has been struggling for years with low milk prices, said Smith, who is also executive director of the Franklin County Industrial Development Corporation. On top of that, restaurants and shops endured weeks of shutdowns under the governor’s order amid the coronavirus pandemic. The city’s unemployment rate was 2.7% before the pandemic and rose to 11.4% by June, in a state that previously had one of the lowest jobless rates in the country.

On a recent weekday mid-morning, the sidewalks were mostly empty on the half dozen blocks...