New MPI Brief Highlights Mismatch between Design of Adult Skills Policies and Immigrant Adults’ Needs
WASHINGTON, DC — One in every six adults in the United States is an immigrant. These immigrant adults contribute to the vitality of the U.S. economy and local communities, but at the same time often face barriers to their integration and economic mobility. These barriers include limited English proficiency, lower levels of formal education, persistent employment in low-wage jobs and unfamiliarity with U.S. institutions and society.
Adult skills programs within the nation’s workforce development and adult education systems offer services that are intended to address many of these challenges. Too often, though, the policy and program designs at the heart of these systems fail to account for important differences in the demographic characteristics of U.S.- and foreign-born adult populations. This can lead to programming that is not geared to effectively meet the workforce and learning needs of immigrants—who represent a significant share of U.S. workers.
With potential reauthorization of the federal law that governs adult skills programs on the horizon (the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, or WIOA), a new issue brief from the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy offers a data analysis with important implications for future adult skills policy and program design.
The brief, Leveraging Data to Ensure Equitable and Effective Adult Skills Programming for Immigrants, draws on analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to provide a profile of U.S.-born and immigrant adults. It details characteristics such as age, parental status, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, English proficiency, employment and income. It also discusses the implications of key data trends for adult skills programs.
The analysis demonstrates that large shares of the immigrant population face barriers to economic mobility and integration; it also identifies disparities between immigrant and U.S.-born adults in income, levels of formal education and employment type.
The findings also underscore that immigrants should be a significant target population for adult skills systems. Yet immigrants often face high barriers to accessing educational and training services due to the design of current policy frameworks. For example, the program performance measures required under WIOA—the primary source of funds for many adult skills programs across the country—incentivize systems and programs to achieve outcomes that favor those with higher levels of English proficiency and education. These mandatory outcomes include participants’ attainment of a significant wage gain and earning post-secondary or other education credentials, as well as the program’s effectiveness in serving employers. This can leave providers with less flexibility to serve those with lower levels of literacy and English proficiency, who are disproportionately immigrants; it can also hinder programs’ attempts to provide immigrants with critical skills and knowledge related to integration, which is another goal of the law, but not one reflected in its performance measures.
“The very adult skills programs and systems that could be well-positioned to support immigrants’ economic, civic and linguistic integration are often neither geared toward nor incentivized to serve them,” the authors write.
Whether in negotiations around state-level policy changes or WIOA reauthorization, policymakers in the adult skills arena should consider adopting and expanding approaches that account for the demographic differences between immigrant and U.S.-born adults and also recognize civic and economic integration, along with English proficiency, as key factors in the success of immigrants, their families and the communities in which they settle, the brief concludes.
Read the issue brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/data-adult-skills-programming.
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