Immigrants make significant contributions to the U.S. economy and social fabric, but many also face barriers to integration. Adult education and workforce development programs offer services intended to help address such challenges yet can be mismatched to immigrants' needs. This issue brief sketches a profile of U.S.-born and immigrant adults, highlighting key similarities and differences relevant to the design of adult skills programs.
Shortages of workers continue to plague early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems across the United States. With the field already struggling to effectively serve young children in families that speak languages other than English, apprenticeship programs offer a promising solution to bring more—and more multilingual—workers into early childhood careers.
U.S. adult education systems have undergone significant changes, including to programs supporting immigrant integration. The creation of the Integrated English Literacy and Civics Education (IELCE) program has sparked the development of innovative initiatives, but also raised concerns about their accessibility and ability to meet immigrant adults’ diverse learning goals and needs.
Child care provided informally by relatives, friends, and neighbors is the most common form of U.S. child care, and it is particularly prevalent among immigrant and Dual Language Learner families. Yet it is frequently overlooked in child-care policy conversations. This brief explores the importance of this type of care and highlights promising practices for increasing support for care providers and the families they serve.
The number of U.S. adults who could benefit from efforts to boost postsecondary credential attainment is strikingly large. Nearly 96 million working-age adults lack a postsecondary credential, 28 million of them of immigrant origin, MPI estimates. This commentary examines how enabling immigrant-origin adults to attain credentials beyond a high school diploma is vital to both building a skilled workforce and closing equity gaps.
Parents play an important role in supporting their children’s education, but certain factors—such as limited English proficiency, low levels of formal education, and digital access barriers—can make it difficult to do so. This fact sheet series looks at the characteristics of immigrant and U.S.-born parents of young and elementary-school-age children in 31 states and nationwide, and discusses how taking a two-generation approach to services can benefit entire families.
With the U.S. health-care system buckling under the resurgent COVID-19 outbreak, policymakers could undertake efforts to enable skilled, underemployed international health-care professionals to practice. This would both make the health system more resilient and flexible, as well as introduce critical language and cultural skills important during the contact-tracing and vaccine rollout phases of the pandemic response, as this commentary explores.
Working-age immigrant women in the United States entered the COVID-19-induced recession with unemployment rates similar to those of other groups. Yet they have been among the most affected by pandemic-related job losses. This fact sheet seeks to explain why they have been hit so hard by the coronavirus-induced recession.
Immigrants and their U.S.-born children are key drivers of U.S. labor force growth. As some occupations grow and others decline, this report explores how these immigrant-origin workers fit within the changing world of work. It examines the degree to which workers from different racial/ethnic groups hold growing and declining jobs, and what changes in the mix of jobs mean for workforce development and immigration policy.
The Trump administration's changes to the H-1B visa program are the most significant in three decades, promising to end the practice of replacing U.S. workers with highly skilled immigrants. While the problems the administration has identified and the interest in protecting U.S. workers are legitimate ones, its approach may cripple the H-1B program itself, as this commentary explains.
Across the United States, the skills of an estimated 263,000 immigrants and refugees with health-related degrees are going underutilized during a time of pandemic, with these health professionals either in low-skilled jobs or out of work. This fact sheet offers the first-ever state profiles of this population, including the states in which they live, the languages they speak, their fields of study, and legal statuses.
Even as the pandemic-induced loss of tens of millions of jobs over a period of weeks dealt a devastating blow across the United States, its effects were most pronounced on certain demographic groups: Immigrant women and, regardless whether they were born in or outside the United States, Latinos and workers with less than a high school degree or under age 25.
Immigrants make up a disproportionately high number of U.S. health-care workers, from doctors and nurses to home health aides. In 2018, more than 2.6 million immigrants worked in the U.S. health-care field. In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, immigrants have played a key role in the frontline response. This article explores the demographics of this group of essential workers by occupation, origin, language, education, and more.
On this webinar, experts and state refugee resettlement program leaders discuss activities that can be key parts of a broader strategy for sustaining and improving employment services for refugees, including partnerships with experts in workforce development strategies, access to federal workforce development funding, and other policies and resources.
Apprenticeship Programs Are a Promising Solution to Bring More Multilingual Workers into Early Childhood Field
Shortages of workers continue to plague early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems across the United States. With the field already struggling to effectively serve young children in families that speak languages other than English, apprenticeship programs offer a promising solution to bring more—and more multilingual—workers into early childhood careers.
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