The Integration of Immigrants in the Workplace

Executive Summary This project addressing the challenges of integrating immigrants in the workplace was conceived as a result of a plenary session at the 2003 Workplace Learning Conference on the same topic. That session revealed deep-seated frustration among workforce professionals who reported that very little appeared to be available to them with respect to policies and practices that had been shown to be effective in integrating foreign-born workers in American workplaces. At first, we thought that the source of this frustration was an ineffective system for disseminating information. And, to a fair degree we found that we were correct. However, as we investigated further, we learned that there are significant areas where the research is simply suggestive of good practices and other areas where there is no serious research at all – especially in the context of the United States. We also learned that although immigrants comprise a significant part of the backbone of the American labor market, they also are viewed as being a special population that is out of the mainstream. Consequently, human resources professionals, labor activists, community organizers, educators, political leaders and policymakers, and workforce professionals had few, if any, opportunities to discuss and learn about effective strategies, policies and practices at conferences held at their associations. Clearly, no single project is able to fill the gap in knowledge in how foreign-born workers are integrated successfully into the workplace. First, the issues are extraordinarily complex in terms of the social, cultural, educational, motivational factors of immigrant groups, and in terms of systems that serve as bridges into the workplace and the community. Second, American attitudes and policies towards immigrants in the workplace are both ambiguous and ambivalent, resulting in highly localized initiatives – often at the scale of actions taken within the four walls of a business. In regulated occupations such as nursing, policies and practices vary state by state, and often, community by community. Finally, federal, state and local policymakers base their visions of a workforce development system on models that assume that the coming generations of workers in the United States will be born and educated here despite overwhelming evidence demonstrating that growth in the workforce depends substantially on migrations of foreign-born workers. A change to models that account for multiple pathways, both foreign and domestic, into the U.S. workforce would require a fundamental shift in what we imagine will be the faces of American …