WASHINGTON, DC — As the U.S. labor market is reshaped by technological change, aging and declines in fertility and legal immigration, there is a consensus that for the economy to grow with fewer workers, productivity will have to increase and workers will need higher levels of skills and training. In stark contrast with past trends, 80 percent of today’s jobs require more than a high school degree. Yet more than 115 million U.S. adults lacked education or training beyond high school as of 2019, with 21 percent of them immigrants.
A Migration Policy Institute (MPI) issue brief out today, Diverging Pathways: Immigrants’ Legal Status and Access to Postsecondary Credentials, estimates that nearly 24 million immigrant adults in the United States lack a college degree, apprenticeship certificate or professional license. Using a unique methodology for assigning legal status to the foreign born in Census Bureau data, the analysis breaks this population down by U.S. citizenship and legal status to better understand its characteristics. It also profiles the immigrant subgroups with the greatest potential for credential acquisition as well as those facing the most significant hurdles.
Efforts to upskill U.S. workers are particularly relevant in a labor market where the number of job openings—many in middle- and high-skill positions—is high, at 11.2 million as of the end of July, and when economists have begun to detect a decline in labor productivity.
“Several broad, long-running trends—such as the declining fertility and aging of the U.S. population—reinforce the logic of including immigrants in workforce development policies and programs,” authors Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix write. “Taken together, these labor market and demographic trends mean that the country’s sustained growth will depend on how well the United States trains and utilizes its available workforce, including immigrants.”
The issue brief, which draws upon the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey to examine the age 16-64 population, finds that:
“Most adult immigrants in the United States who lack credentials are legally present, and most have at least a high school education and are ready targets for state efforts to increase the number of residents with high-quality credentials,” Batalova and Fix conclude. “Including these adults in broader efforts to upskill and credential the workforce would expand their mobility while at the same time closing skills gaps and meeting employers’ labor force needs. Additionally, given the high share of racial and ethnic minorities among immigrant adults without postsecondary credentials, their more purposeful inclusion in education and training programs would help advance the important social goal of promoting greater equity.”
Read the issue brief here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/immigrants-status-postsecondary-credentials.