Honoring Immigrants’ Contributions, Advancing Immigrant Workforce Inclusion
This month marks National Immigrant Heritage Month – and we’re joining the celebration, recognizing the wide influence that immigrants and refugees have had on the civic, social, and economic fabric of the U.S.
Immigrants have played a large role in shaping this country, and they continue to punch above their weight: While immigrants make up 14% of the U.S. population, they account for 18.1% of the U.S. workforce. Even further, immigrants play an outsized role in the labor force, with 65.9% for the foreign-born actively employed versus 61.5% of the U.S.-born.
For all of these contributions, immigrants and refugees are poised to do more – if we make intentional investments in building a more inclusive workforce. As we mark this special month, let’s not only celebrate immigrant and refugee communities, but also commit to supporting their continued advancement and success.
One important place to start is through career-aligned English upskilling. Adults who are still learning English earn up to 40% less than their peers who speak the language proficiently. At EnGen, we’re partnering with state and federal agencies, non-profits, education institutions, and employers of all sizes to serve the 96% of adult English learners who are not currently being served with the English upskilling they need to thrive in today’s economy.
Helping Industries Drive Growth
Immigrants are already making critical contributions to essential sectors like healthcare, hospitality, retail, and small business development. EnGen’s mobile-first, industry-aligned platform provides the English and workforce readiness skills to maximize these contributions, putting English learners on pathways to career and economic mobility. Here’s how:
In healthcare, Immigrants are already 16.5% of the workforce, including 29% of physicians, 22% of nursing assistants, and 28% of home health aides. With multilingual and multicultural skills linked to improved communication and patient health outcomes, immigrants are poised to make an even greater impact on the sector if given the opportunity. Our healthcare-related pathways include both language and career skills related to medicine, dentistry, nursing, EMTs, patient care and support, medical coding and billing, and much more.
In the restaurant and hospitality sector, immigrants, refugees, and speakers of other languages make up 31% of the workforce. To expand access to English upskilling for these workers, we’ve developed hospitality and restaurant-related pathways like introduction to housekeeping, English for food and beverage, English for tourism and hospitality, and English for food safety.
In retail and e-commerce, immigrants and refugees account for 14.3% of the sector workforce. Our English for grocery customer service and retail customer service support the upskilling of foreign-born workers in this critical sector. We’re also proud to partner with e-commerce giants like Amazon and Walmart to build customized English upskilling programs for their workers.
Immigrants and refugees are also driving entrepreneurship in the U.S. Immigrants are twice as likely as their U.S.-born peers to start a business, employing an estimated 8 million other U.S. workers in the process. We support learners with English skills – along with steps to plan, market, manage, and grow a business – with our English for entrepreneurship pathway.
At EnGen, we’re proud to play a growing role in helping immigrants, refugees, and speakers of other languages expand their English skills to make ke contributions to our economy and our society. Our platform is built on technology that has served more than 4 million English learners across the globe – and we’re committed to scaling to serve all immigrants, refugees, and speakers of other languages here in the U.S.
Support immigrants and refugees in your community. Learn how EnGen powers English proficiency, along with career & economic mobility: Request a platform demo.