Making the Case for The JobUp
This summer I embarked on a project to fill a service gap for the community of malemployed immigrants in New York. They are people who have acquired a college education or higher abroad, but cannot find skill-appropriate jobs in the U.S. because the immigration system is not designed to help foreigners integrate either socially or professionally.
Such structural inadequacies come at a cost: nearly 2 million newcomers, nationwide are unable to make any use of their education. They survive on jobs such as driving, cleaning or busing tables, earning a fraction of the incomes they could otherwise. New York State is home to 212,000 of them, according to the State of the Workforce 2018, a report by the New York Association of Training and Employment Professionals.
The unmet needs of this population — suitable English-language classes, referrals to mentoring networks, career guidance and so on — create a programming vacuum that a handful of innovative organizations have been addressing only in the last 20 years. Among them are the Welcome Back Initiative for immigrants with a healthcare background; Upwardly Global, which generally helps malemployed nonnatives who are already fluent in English; and the Community College Consortium for Immigrant Education (CCCIE), which offers curricula designed to take into account immigrants’ foreign educations. The last is an essential approach that spares people the daunting, costly process of starting from scratch in the U.S.
Based on that knowledge and my own life experiences as an Italian immigrant in the States, I created The JobUp. It’s a workshop series that offers both professional-level English-language classes and workforce orientation resources to help participants better navigate the local labor market.
I rolled it out in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn this summer in cooperation with the Turkish Cultural Center, with which I began to develop a rapport in January. Its leaders referred community members to the program, and The JobUp took sail!
Grounded in Experience
My own story in the U.S., which started in the 1990s, gives me a wealth of knowledge to draw from. I have long wanted to guide fellow newcomers through the arduous terrain of socio-professional adaptation, especially those who arrived with an education, as I did. But the time had to be right.
Both the policies and the politics of immigration are now central to U.S. social discourse. And while they’re highly contentious — exposing deep-seeded biases about race and privilege — it is also a time when declining birth rates, record-low unemployment in the States, and an aging population make it impossible to ignore the relevance of immigration.
In fact, research shows that newcomers are necessary at all skill levels. In a recent article titled “Is Immigration at Its Limit? Not for Employers,” The New York Times reported how difficult is becoming for U.S. companies to find enough Americans to fill job vacancies.
“Without immigration, we shrink as a nation,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin told the Times. He is the “former director of the Congressional Budget Office who has advised Republican presidential candidates and now leads the conservative American Action Forum.” Investor’s Business Daily emphasized the same findings in “Immigration Facts That The U.S. Labor Market Must Reckon With.”
Thus, now is the time to deal with the realities of immigration at all levels of society, including how to take advantage of the huge economic potentialof qualified newcomers who already live in our communities but have no chances of professional growth.
I believe now is also at a time to reckon with learning how to live together beyond labels.
When the winds of anti-immigrant rhetoric started to pick up during the 2016 presidential campaign, Megan Dottermusch, then the community manager for social work at Simmons College, in Boston, invited me to write a piece about my immigrant experience for “#MoreThanALabel: Immigrant Stories,” one of the college’s initiatives.
I gladly accepted and wrote: “We become outsiders versus insiders, new versus established, isolated versus networked. We become them versusus.”
Now, as people continue to struggle with those attitudes, I ask myself how journalists can help build empathy around immigrant integration to move it from a personal story of hardship to a collective problem worth solving? What role can we play in it? And if we don’t do, are we affirming old, negative narratives and mentalities?
I see immigrant malemployment as a vehicle to a larger conversation about inclusion and exclusion in society, one that strives to understand “how higher-level dynamics at the local, national and international levels trickle down and creep up” to affect us all. (“What Journalists Can Learn From Organizers,” Tiziana Rinaldi, Medium.)
Ultimately, that’s what The JobUp is all about.
