Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees - GCIR

During the 1990s, one out of every two new workers was an immigrant. While many immigrants speak English well and enter the United States with strong academic credentials and skills, many others do not. Like other low-skilled workers, few of these immigrants enjoyed the benefits of employer-provided training programs, most of which are geared to managers or highly skilled workers. Low-wage immigrant workers have also been outside the reach of government-sponsored job training programs that concentrate on getting welfare recipients into the labor market and have often underserved persons with limited English skills. The report looks at the reauthorization of the 1998 Workforce Investment Act (WIA)—the largest source of federal funding for job training, adult basic education, and English as a second language (ESL) instruction—sheds light on the need for policies that move in these directions.