Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, has praised a new effort to help immigrants transition from the city’s shelter system to work, with new programs offering job training, legal aid and English language teaching services.
So far, the city has enrolled about 800 immigrants in the program, with more expected. Added By the end of June, according to NBC News.
“Our goal was to turn what people see as a crisis into an opportunity,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston told media. “We have people coming into our city who are desperate to work, who have skills and talent and discipline. We have employers in the city who are desperately looking for employees and desperately wanting to hire them. What we wanted to do is take people who want to work and connect them with the job-centered training and skills that are most needed. So what we did is this asylum seeker program, the first of its kind in the nation.”
Migrants who have participated in the program are housed in the city’s shelter system and are reportedly in the process of applying for asylum, which would allow them to fast-track work authorization within six months.
Johnston added that over the six-month period the new program will see migrants receive English classes, financial literacy training, job training and legal assistance with their asylum applications.
“So once you’re authorized to work, you already have the skills, the training, the permits, the certifications, you’re able to get to work on day one and you’re a huge asset to employers in Denver,” Johnston said of the immigrants.
The program will allow more immigrants to enter the workforce before citizens do, according to CIS.org. growth The vast majority of hiring opportunities from 2019 to 2023 went to foreign-born applicants.
The group looked at labor force participation rates starting in 2019, just before the pandemic, and found that the share of U.S.-born men ages 18-64 without a bachelor’s degree will be 75.6% by 2023. That’s still down from 76.3% in 2019.
But these rates are well below the 80.6% in 2006 and 82.6% in 2000. Also, in the 1960s, almost 90% of men in this field were in the labor force.
Meanwhile, immigrant men without a bachelor’s degree currently make up 85.5% of the workforce, a higher percentage than nationals.
“While figures have continued to recover from the lows of 2020, [during COVID]As of the fourth quarter of 2023, there are 183,000 fewer U.S.-born Americans in the workforce than in the fourth quarter of 2019, pre-COVID-19. The number of employed immigrants (legal and illegal) is 2.9 million more than in 2019.”
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