This paper responds to the growth of the immigrant and refugee population and the resulting increase in diversity in rural and urban communities across the United States. It seeks to enhance grantmakers’ understanding of intergroup relations within the dynamic context of immigration and to identify effective strategies for foundations to consider.

Newcomers in the American Workplace is a joint publication of Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees and the Neighborhood Funders' Group's Working on Labor and Community. This report responds to the dramatic growth in the immigrant population over the past decade and calls attention to the crucial role that immigrants play in the U.S. economy. Today, immigrants comprise almost one in eight workers and one in four low-wage workers. They are the backbone of many industries that simply would not be able to survive without their skills, labor, and innovation.

Newcomers in the American Workplace also highlights the multiple challenges immigrants confront in the labor force, from lack of legal status to language and cultural barriers. Targeting the foundation audience, the report offers examples of innovative approaches for addressing these challenges and recommends a range of grantmaking strategies, from supporting research, organizing, and advocacy aimed at improving employment outcomes for today's low-wage immigrant workers to supporting efforts that strengthen the ability of public education systems to prepare second-generation immigrants for successful workforce participation.

GCIR and NFG extend our special thanks to The Ford Foundation, The Hitachi Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation for their generous support of this publication and to the many organizations that shared their knowledge and expertise on issues facing low-wage immigrant workers.

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Ordering Information

Out of print. Electronic copy available online.

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Executive Summary

First-generation immigrants play a crucial role in the U.S. economy, comprising almost one in eight workers^[source] and one in four low-wage workers.^[source] They fill critical jobs, are the backbone of many industries, and are net contributors to the nation's tax base. Without current and future immigrants in the workforce, our aging society will be dramatically short of workers to staff its offices, factories, and farms; short of savings and investment to support national economic growth; and short of tax revenues to finance government services and Social Security outlays.

Despite their pivotal role in the U.S. economy, many immigrant workers confront enormous challenges in the labor force: language and cultural barriers, exploitative working conditions, immigration-status vulnerabilities, restrictions on access to public services and benefits, and workforce development and education systems that do not respond to their needs. Disproportionately concentrated in low-wage jobs, immigrants make up 20 percent of all low-income families,^[source] although they constitute about 11 percent of the total population.

Given immigrants' growing numbers and their expanding economic role in U.S. society, addressing challenges and creating opportunities for immigrants to succeed in the labor force are critical prerequisites to improve the economic security for all low-wage working families and ensure the future vitality of our economy.

In response, foundations can consider a range of grantmaking strategies depending on their funding approaches, issue priorities, geographic focus, and level of interest in immigration. By incorporating immigrant workers into their grantmaking priorities, foundations can play a vital role in spurring and supporting innovative strategies to improve working conditions, increase wages, enhance employment mobility, and strengthen economic security for all low-wage workers.

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Findings

Profile of Immigrants in the Workforce

1. The face of America and its workforce has changed. The immigrant population in the United States increased from 19.8 million in 1990 to 31.1 million in 2000. Immigrants now comprise 11.1 percent of the U.S. population and 12.4 percent of the nation's workforce.^[source] In the 1990s, 78.2 percent of the foreign-born population came from Latin American and Asian countries,^[source] many of which countries had poor economic conditions and low levels of investment in education and skill development.
2. Immigrants will account for half of the working-age population growth between 2006 and 2015 and for all of the growth between 2016 and 2035, assuming today's levels of immigration remain constant. Their labor is critically needed to replace the declining number of working-age Americans as the "baby boomer" generation retires.^[source]
3. Immigrant workers are concentrated in low-skill, low-pay jobs, although they are represented across the employment spectrum. For example, almost 63 percent of foreign-born workers, primarily from Latin America, work in service, manufacturing, and agricultural occupations.^[source] Roughly 17 percent of highly skilled technology professionals working in the United States are foreign born.^[source]

Challenges Keeping Immigrants in Working Poverty

1. Immigration status matters. Approximately nine million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, accounting for about 28 percent of all immigrants in this country.^[source] Nearly five million undocumented immigrants are part of the U.S. workforce.^[source] Immigration status plays a central role in keeping many undocumented workers in poverty. Without legal status, they have little choice but to remain in jobs that pay minimum wage or below, with few or no benefits such as health insurance or pensions. These jobs are frequently part-time or seasonal, forcing immigrants to string together several jobs at one time to support their families. And working conditions are often dangerous or unhealthy. The aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks has only compounded legal-status challenges for undocumented immigrants.
2. Many immigrants confront multiple barriers to employment. Immigrants arrive in the United States with a variety of educational and occupational backgrounds. While newly arrived immigrants include a higher percentage of people with advanced degrees compared to native-born persons, they also include a higher percentage of people with fewer than nine years of formal education. Immigrants' lack of English proficiency, limited skills, low levels of education, and poor understanding of American cultural and workplace norms restrict their access to good jobs that pay family-sustaining wages and provide opportunities for advancement.
3. Many job training and placement programs are not accessible to or meet the unique needs of immigrant and other limited-English workers. One-stop centers and other publicly funded programs often have difficulty providing basic language access, much less culturally competent services.
4. Low-wage immigrant workers are the least likely to receive job-based benefits. In 2000, only 26 percent of immigrant workers had job-based health insurance, compared to 41.9 percent for native-born workers.^[source] Immigrants are also less likely to hold jobs that provide other fringe benefits, such as paid sick days and pensions.
5. Many immigrants do not access or are ineligible for government programs. Immigrants, including those who are eligible, are the least likely to access programs that support low-income workers, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and Unemployment Insurance. Additionally, legal immigrants entering the United States after 1996 are ineligible, during their first five years in the country, for federal programs such as Food Stamps and Medicaid that many native-born, low-wage workers regularly access to support their families.
6. Immigrants suffer unique discrimination and exploitation in the workplace. Many U.S. employers treat immigrant workers fairly and comply with labor and immigration law. Some, however, discriminate against them or exploit them through low wages, long hours, poor working conditions, or denial of other rights. Although native-born workers can also be subject to such treatment, immigration status, compounded by cultural and linguistic isolation, increases immigrants' vulnerability to discrimination and exploitation.
7. Immigrants who participate in union-organizing drives are particularly vulnerable to employer intimidation tactics, such as reporting workers to the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service).* Although such tactics are illegal under U.S. labor law, penalties are light and often come too late to change the outcome of organizing campaigns.
8. Current labor laws do not provide comprehensive worker protections. Immigrants often hold jobs, such as temporary and seasonal jobs, that are not protected under labor laws. Even immigrants who are protected frequently do not file complaints, fearing that they will be fired, reported to the INS, and/or deported.
9. Improving working conditions, wages, and benefits in low-skill occupations is an important strategy. Not every worker--immigrant or native--will be able to acquire the education and skills needed to move into jobs at the higher rungs of the economic ladder. In addition, low-skill jobs in the service, manufacturing, and agricultural industries will always be part of the economy, and some occupations, such as home healthcare aides, are expected to experience significant growth in this decade. These jobs do not necessarily have to pay poverty-level wages and no benefits. In many cases, particularly where workers are covered under a collective-bargaining agreement, employers do pay decent wages, provide family health and pension benefits, and contribute to training funds that offer career advancement opportunities.

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Recommendations to Funders

Regardless of grantmaking approach, priorities, and geographic focus, foundations can support a range of strategic options to improve working conditions, strengthen workers' rights, and expand employment opportunities for low-wage immigrant workers in ways that improve economic security for all workers. Foundations can support:

1. Efforts to enhance language access to welfare-to-work programs and increase the availability of English-language classes.
2. Comprehensive workforce development programs that integrate job training (both hard and soft skills), English-language acquisition, and cultural orientation.
3. Workforce development programs that forge multi-sector partnerships among employers, unions, community groups, faith-based organizations, and government.
4. Programs that help immigrants gain fair recognition and receive accreditation for the skills, education, and experience they bring from their country of origin.
5. Strategies to improve the ability of public education systems to successfully educate children of immigrants to improve their long-term employment outcomes and economic security.
6. Efforts to educate and develop the leadership of immigrant and other low-wage workers to protect their workplace rights, increase their wages and benefits, and improve their employment potential.
7. Community-based efforts to protect immigrant workers who may risk intimidation, job loss, or deportation if they participate in union-organizing drives.
8. Advocacy and organizing to improve public policy, employer practices, and economic outcomes for low-wage immigrants.
9. Research on low-wage immigrant worker issues to inform program and policy development.
10. Legal services, advocacy, and litigation to protect and advance worker's rights.

*The INS, formerly part of the of the U.S. Department of Justice, was reorganized into two separate bureaus - the Bureau of Border Security and the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services - under the Department of Homeland Security, established in fall 2002. Restructuring the INS has only begun at the time of this writing. Therefore, this report utilizes the more commonly recognized term, "INS" when referring to the federal immigration department.

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Like the ancestors of today's native born, newcomers fill crucial jobs, revitalize communities, and contribute to the nation's social and economic growth. And like previous generations of immigrants who came before them, today's newcomers also face challenges to participation and integration. Discrimination, cross-cultural misunderstanding, and injustice in the workplace and the community can create cynicism and erect formidable barriers to engagement and integration. Long hours at work can steal time from family and community life; limited formal education can stall the learning of English and full entry into society. Parents who are isolated can pass isolation on to the next generation.

Yet, with the critically important support of foundation-funded community organizations, more and more newcomers--whether they are undocumented immigrants or naturalized citizens, restaurant workers or high-tech professionals, from Africa, Asia, or Central America--are overcoming these challenges by becoming actively engaged at all levels of our democracy. This report highlights but a few examples of their participation and the impact they are having at the grassroots, grasstops, and every level in between. As their numbers continue to grow, immigrants and their families, with strategic community interventions, can play an increasingly important role in strengthening the social fabric of our country.

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Growing Philanthropic Interest

Responding to demographic change, foundations of varying type, geographic focus, and funding priority are investing in a range of newcomer civic participation strategies.

• Foundations with categorical interests are successfully using immigrant civic engagement to improve health, education, youth, and employment outcomes. They are funding, for example, programs to engage parents in their children's education, train health promotoras to do prevention education, and bring diverse youth together to organize against racial and ethnic profiling.
• Foundations seeking systemic policy reform in these areas are recognizing immigrants to be important allies and often leaders in policy advocacy and organizing efforts that they support.
• Likewise, foundations devoted to the preservation of worker, civil, and/or human rights are funding efforts that engage immigrants in the struggle, recognizing the impact of these issues on immigrants and the important role immigrants can play in effective change.
• Foundations with interest in improving intergroup relations, building community, and reviving civic life are actively involving our 11 percent and growing foreign-born population, drawing on their strengths and assets to address these persistent community challenges.
• Growing numbers of foundations interested in improving social conditions of any kind are acknowledging that both newcomers and the community at large have a stake in and stand to benefit from immigrant civic participation. They also understand that, in the absence of engagement and integration, the isolation of newcomers can only lead to greater problems.

Regardless of their funding priorities, many foundations are increasingly recognizing immigrants and refugees as a key population to which they must respond. Many are asking important questions about how their grantee organizations are engaging newcomers in their work and integrating this growing population into the broader community.

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The Value of Civic Participation

Civic participation is the process that draws newcomers into collective problem solving to improve conditions in matters affecting their lives. Based on the democratic belief that sustainable social improvement is possible only when those experiencing problems are involved in learning how to solve them, civic participation turns communities into places of intentional learning and relationship building. It does so by engaging people collectively in all aspects of problem selection and solution: identification and analysis of issues, research and planning toward strategies of approach, and implementation and evaluation of these strategic plans.

Both an end in itself and a means to other ends, newcomer participation produces results at individual, organizational and community levels. Through civic participation, newcomers:

• Develop their human capital, i.e., their individual potential, leadership and voice, with measures of acquired skills, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. In the words of one immigrant civic participant, "Before, I was shy and scared, but [becoming involved] helped me to build my own voice. I can go everywhere now... We women are hungry to bring Somali power to the community."
• Build social capital, i.e., networks of human and institutional relationships, with measures of depth, breadth, diversity, and durability. One community organizer puts it this way: "To build relationships you want to focus on what's common, get people working together to improve quality-of-life issues they share."
• Develop institutional capital, i.e., democratic, membership-based organizations, with measures of member ownership and participation in decision making and governance. A community-based researcher offers this analysis: "We can't change education levels, English language skills, and economic levels overnight. But we can change organizations to engage immigrants. Without these organizations, we can't have immigrant civic participation."
• Create community capital, i.e., positive community change, with measures of policies improved, systems and institutions made more accountable, problems solved or prevented. A former director of a worker center writes, "On September 17, 1997, Governor George Pataki of New York signed the Unpaid Wages Prohibition Act, giving New York State the strongest wage enforcement law in the country. That Act was won through a campaign conceived of and led by immigrant workers."^[source]
• Become full, contributing members of American society and democratic life. This is true for all immigrants, regardless of their immigration status. From an immigrant labor leader: "Even though not everyone can vote, everyone can participate."

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Fundamental Guiding Principles

Four fundamental principles shape effective civic participation efforts and can assist foundations in evaluating projects and institutions engaging newcomers in civic life.

• Engagement is paramount. Newcomers are encouraged to engage in all aspects of community problem solving.
• Participation starts where the newcomer starts. More than likely this begins with working on issues that affect their daily lives, not in a voting booth or a political campaign, though it is the way to get there.
• Education informs all. Learning is at the core of program design.
• Relationship matters. Building relationships with people from different backgrounds is a central program component.

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Diverse Opportunities for Foundation Investment

Guided by the principles of community organizing and popular education, newcomer civic participation takes place in a variety of organizational settings, including:

• National community organizing networks and neighborhood centers;
• Affiliations through the affinities of faith, ethnicity and common concern; and
• Unions, churches, schools, and community arts programs.

These diverse pathways to civic engagement for immigrants offer rich opportunities for philanthropic investment, such as:

• Naturalization programs that integrate civic participation into their curricula, making the preparation for citizenship a preparation for full engagement in civic life.
• National and local faith-based organizing networks that organize immigrants around key social and economic issues as wide-ranging as health care, community disinvestment, police brutality, and workers' rights.
• Efforts to promote cultural expression and exchange that provide immigrants and refugees a powerful entrée into public life and an opportunity to build relationship with native-born communities.
• Youth organizing institutions that cultivate the leadership of young people, often bringing them together across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and immigration status.
• Community-labor partnerships that engage low-wage immigrant workers and their allies in improving wages, working conditions, and community life.
• Worker Centers and Hometown Associations that are emerging avenues for immigrant civic engagement and leadership development on many levels, from organizing soccer leagues to fighting against unscrupulous employers to fundraising for community-improvement projects.
• Training and technical assistance intermediaries that are developing immigrant organizers and helping service and advocacy institutions integrate civic participation approaches into their work.
• Non-partisan voter education, get-out-the-vote efforts, and leadership development programs that give immigrants of any status, regardless of their ability to vote, the tools they need to engage effectively in our nation's political process.

Civic engagement is the democracy at work, producing multiple outcomes of positive change, and interrelated goals that cannot be reached in other ways. As America's demographic diversity becomes inevitably more representative of the diversity of the world, simultaneously testing our ideals and increasing our assets, foundations of many types and priorities have reason to consider investment in newcomer civic participation.

To order a hard copy of this publication, click here or call 707.824.4374.

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This publication highlights a selection of top-quality documentary films that illuminate the immigrant experience and issues of integration such as English acquisition, education, employment, health, economic contributions, family cohesion, and Transnationalism. This new resource was curated by Active Voice in partnership with Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees and Grantmakers in Film & Electronic Media. For a hard copy of this report please contact GCIR.

This publication by Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR) and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy (AAPIP) highlights some of the issues, challenges, and concerns facing Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian communities in the United States that have been greatly impacted by societal anger and severe government actions since the tragic events of September 11th.

GCIR and the Annie E. Casey Foundation are pleased to announce the release of Supporting English Language Acquisition: Opportunities for Foundations to Strengthen the Social and Economic Well-Being of Immigrant Families. Given the vital role language proficiency plays in the integration process, this report is essential reading for funders seeking to improve social and economic outcomes for immigrant families.

Supporting English Language Acquisition explores how philanthropy can strengthen immigrant families through strategic investments in language acquisition programs. It discusses successful strategies and offers examples of promising programs that have helped immigrants—regardless of their educational background—to increase their employment prospects and economic stability through improved English and other vocational skills. The report also highlights some of the best practices from literacy programs designed for immigrant families, where both adults and pre-school children can develop English and literacy skills. The report concludes with a set of recommendations on how foundations can effectively support English language acquisition in these areas, including gaps in programming and research where strategic philanthropic investment can make a critical difference.

Order printed copies of this publication here.

A briefing memorandum produced by GCIR and the Four Freedoms Fund, updated October 26, 2005. The briefing memorandum provides an overview of the foreign-born populations in the Gulf Coast and their needs in the aftermath of the hurricanes, offers examples of efforts to address the needs, and suggests recommendations for a strategic philanthropic response.

Our researchers interviewed a broad cross-section of immigrant leaders, advocates, and policymakers and have produced this report summarizing their findings. The report briefly describes the circumstances that produced the large immigrant marches and offers concrete funding recommendations for supporting immigrant communities under different scenarios. A key theme that runs throughout this report is the need for funders to provide increased support at this pivotal moment, while coordinating their efforts to maximize impact and avoid duplication.

The Art of Community illustrates how weaving art and culture into program initiatives can lay the foundation for newcomers and the receiving society to find common ground and work together to build vibrant communities in which everyone has a stake. It offers strategies, lessons, and insights to inform foundation giving at the intersection of arts and community services.

Including art as part of the process of immigrant integration is discussed on the Americans for the Arts audio blog by Amy Skillman, the Institute for Cultural Partnership's vice president and director of arts and heritage program, and Laura Marcus, independent consultant and folklorist. 

Description: Despite rising to the top of the domestic policy agenda last year, comprehensive immigration reform fell victim to the politics of mid-term congressional elections. This update provides perspectives from philanthropists in the field who provide their predictions on future federal legislation affecting immigrants and refugees.