The problem facing historic buildings nationwide?
A huge backlog of overdue maintenance that’s in dire need of completion, with an estimated cost of $4.5 billion just for Park Service structures alone, according to the PBS NewsHour.
Adding to the problem is that the workers who perform skilled restoration work are aging. So is there any solution?
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has partnered with the National Park Service and other groups to launch a pilot project, Hands-On Preservation Experience, or HOPE, that provides young people with jobs as it trains them to restore aging structures.
One such project already underway is at Skyland Stables in Virginia’s Shenandoah Mountains, where experienced craftsman David Logan guides students in restoring the structure that was built as a WPA project during the 1930’s. Logan, who owns the restoration company Vintage, Inc., told Jeffrey Brown of PBS NewsHour, “What I have done is guided the team just on some approaches for replacing siding, ways of cutting out the old, and then how to handle the oak to let it move, and just little tips and advice.”
The students earn $10 an hour, compared to $40-$60 an hour a contractor might charge, but also gain valuable skills in the process. Logan said to Brown that he sees fewer tradespeople learning about historic preservation these days.
One of the students is Elijah Smith of Washington, D.C. “I think it’s important to save old buildings, because when you go back, you can see what you did right, what you did wrong, how you want to add ideas to it. And the older something is, the more value it is to it. It brings more people to it,” he said.
Not only does this program shore up some of our nation’s treasures, but it provides youth with a new career path, too.
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Tag: jobs
This Unique Program Tackles Poverty Two Generations at a Time
Poverty often results in a myriad of problems for families that a single intervention is unable to fix. That’s why in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Career Advance Program (CAP) is tackling the effects of poverty in two generations at the same time: Working to help low-income mothers attain training for nursing and other medical-industry careers while ensuring their kids receive high-quality childcare through the local Head Start program.
CAP includes a required monthly seminar class for the mothers on career skills — such as interviewing and resume building — and meetings with life coaches to help participants learn time management skills, how to deal with stress, and ways to overcome troubles (ranging from dead cars to kitchen fires, for example). CAP pays for the mothers’ tuition and childcare. Plus, the program offers $200 bonuses (in the form of gasoline cards or expense reimbursements) for good grades.
Steven Dow, the executive director of CAP Tulsa, told Eric Westervelt of NPR, “The paradox of our early childhood work is that we are so focused on young children. And yet, many of the outcomes we want for young children are dependent on being able to also make progress with their parents and the adults. So this interplay is a tough nut to crack.”
CAP is producing positive results: When the kids see their mothers studying, they’re more motivated to study, too. And when the families increase their income and move off public assistance, the kids’ academic futures become brighter.
It’s a tough road for a low-income parent to earn an RN degree, but CAP is finding that even those who drop out before reaching the end still earn other medical certifications and are able to move up to better jobs than they had before. The career coaches make the difference for many of the participants who are able to stick it out and succeed. “They’ve become almost like second mothers,” program participant Shartara Wallace told Westervelt. “Because they really stay on you, they push you. And then, at the same time, they are there to hold your hand. But just like a parent where it’s like, ‘OK, I need you to walk on your own and handle this, but I still got your back.'”
Consuela Houessou, who immigrated from Benin, is studying to be a registered nurse through CAP Tulsa. She said, “[My kids] want me to do well. We compare grades. ‘I get A today, what did you get?'” With two-generation assistance programs already in place across the country in places including Iowa, Boston, and San Antonio, these mothers and many others may finally be able to break the cycle of poverty.
MORE: Here’s Why We Should Be Investing in Single Moms
Ask the Experts: Why Should Americans Care About Employing Immigrants?
You’ve heard of “brain drain,” the phenomenon of talented workers leaving their home countries for better jobs elsewhere. How about “brain waste”? That’s what’s happening in the United States: Skilled, educated immigrants, having arrived in this country ready to work, can’t find good jobs.
About 1.8 million of these “new Americans” are unemployed, underemployed in semi-skilled jobs or working as unskilled labor making poverty-level wages. On a purely economic level, that’s bad for both immigrants and the country: The U.S. is forfeiting billions of dollars in economic growth potential. Also, when immigrants with advanced degrees are properly employed, it boosts employment for their native U.S. counterparts too, according to a report by the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., and The Partnership for a New American Economy, a nonprofit group co-founded by Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.
The employment of work-authorized, skilled immigrants is a potential boon for society in many other ways — but it’s an issue that often gets overlooked. So NationSwell convened an expert panel — including a policy analyst, an immigration integration reform advocate, a New York City economic development executive and an immigrant-services provider — to answer the question: Why should U.S. citizens care about immigrants’ employment, and what is being done — or should be done — about it?
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Madeleine Sumption
Senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a research group in Washington, D.C.
NationSwell: Why should Americans care about immigrants’ employment?
Madeleine Sumption: The United States is the world’s most attractive destination for people with skills. But it also wastes these skills on an industrial scale. The Migration Policy Institute has estimated that 1.3 million college-educated immigrants are either unemployed or working in low-skilled jobs.
Skilled professionals working in low-skilled jobs forgo tens of thousands of dollars in income. For example, the average civil engineer earns almost $80,000 per year, the average lawyer $114,000, and the average physician $172,000. By contrast, low-skilled health aides earn just $21,000 and dishwashers about $18,000.
For U.S. employers, the failure to use immigrants’ skills to their full potential reduces the pool from which they can recruit, reducing productivity. U.S. consumers cannot benefit from the services these skilled workers might have provided — such as doctors’ visits or legal assistance. And taxpayers lose out as lower-earning immigrants pay fewer taxes and may even require welfare support.
NS: What should we do to fix the problem?
MS: Tackling brain waste is difficult. It requires persistence and political commitment, and the problem cannot be solved overnight. But policy options do exist.
Many foreign-trained immigrants have gaps in their skills and need support to improve their language skills, gain local work experience that helps employers understand their abilities, and navigate complicated licensing systems in regulated occupations like medicine or accounting.
Funding for pilot projects could help build the pool of promising models to reduce the costs of additional training and make it compatible with working immigrants’ busy timetables. Partnerships between community colleges, public employment services and employers can help to provide this assistance at greater scale. And finally, regulators responsible for licensing workers in professional occupations could do more to simplify the application process and assess skills more quickly, so that people trained abroad do not have to repeat years of education and training to demonstrate their skills.
Paul Feltman
Chair of the steering committee of IMPRINT, a coalition of organizations raising awareness about the talents and contributions of immigrant professionals
NS: Why should Americans care about immigrants’ employment?
Paul Feltman: The promise of America is that we’re the land of opportunity. For immigrant professionals, that opportunity should include being able to work in the field for which they have already been educated. I’m talking about meeting the same high standards for professional licensing as American-born applicants. No special treatment.
If an immigrant engineer is driving a taxicab, and it’s not what he wants to do, that’s a loss for him but also for our entire economy. Research indicates that moving a talented person from a low-wage job into a professional-level position doesn’t just help that one person provide for her family. It helps the employer who needs her skills, the community where she pays taxes, and the region in which she lives.
The other reason Americans should care is that many skilled immigrants are Americans themselves. They have become naturalized U.S. citizens and are making a permanent home here, raising their children and becoming part of the American fabric. Their success is our success.
[ph]
NS: What should we do to fix the problem?
PF: For the United States to benefit from skilled immigrants, we need to make sure three things are happening:
1. Information. It can be really hard to find information explaining how an immigrant accountant or nurse gets licensed to practice in this country. But individual immigrants, nonprofit agencies and employers really need to know what the licensing pathways are. They need to know the various options for how internationally educated applicants can return to their professions, and how to overcome common barriers.
2. Connections. People have to be able to find this information, and employers and qualified jobseekers have to be able to find each other in the labor market.
3. Action. It’s not enough to have the information or the connection. You have to be able to act on it. Often, that means making sure that policymakers understand the issue so they can advocate for clearer, easier-to-understand pathways.
Our organization, IMPRINT, works on each of these three areas. Our focus is people who are already residents of the U.S. Our goal is to make sure that if, say, a Russian engineer wants to practice here, they can get the information they need and the connections to make that information useful. Above all, we want people to be equipped to take action. The U.S. prides itself on being a place where anything is possible. We work to make that promise real.
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Nikki Cicerani
President and CEO of Upwardly Global, a nonprofit organization that provides job-search training and connects partner companies with skilled, work-authorized immigrants
NS: Why should Americans care about immigrants’ employment?
Nikki Cicerani: We should care because these foreign-educated immigrants represent an available, highly motivated talent source. While companies consistently tell us they look everywhere for their talent, this is a pool they may be missing. Furthermore, employers that give skilled immigrants their first break in the U.S. tend to be rewarded with strong employee loyalty.
In jobs where they can put their skills and experience to work, immigrants earn more and spend more. They reduce their use of government benefits and instead provide tax revenue that can be staggeringly large. Only about a quarter of the people who come to our program are working. If we get 10 percent of the 1.8 million currently unemployed or underemployed skilled immigrants into jobs where they are earning an average annual salary of $35,000, we’re generating about $6.3 billion of taxable income in a single year.
There are also important intangibles: When an immigrant doesn’t have to work the night shift to support a family, then he or she is joining the PTA and becoming involved in his or her community. These secondary impacts improve the quality of life in our cities and neighborhoods.
You have to have smart integration policies commensurate with immigration policies in order to maximize the skills and experience that immigrants are bringing. That is our message.
NS: What are you doing to fix the problem?
NC: Upwardly Global is a direct services provider for immigrant economic integration. We aim to provide culturally specific training to make our job seekers the best candidates for the job. Once job seekers — who may have recently been doing janitorial work or driving a cab — obtain professional positions, we see very high retention rates a year later. Around 90 percent are still in those jobs a year later, or another in their professional field that pays at least as much.
We are also working towards increased awareness and advocacy. Much of the current discussion around immigration reform centers on the flow of workers into the country, but there’s very little policy that addresses how to integrate these individuals into American life once they’re here. There is an integration chapter in an immigration reform bill, but it is still largely weighted toward civic integration; we’re trying to be a voice for the importance of economic integration.
We don’t advocate changing professional standards, but rather increasing the quality and clarity of information and removing unnecessary burdens for those who are foreign-trained to become relicensed and to re-enter their fields — as well as creating support systems to smooth the transition.
Eric J. Gertler,
Executive vice president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit that promotes economic development
NS: Why should New Yorkers care about immigrants’ employment?
Eric J. Gertler: We estimate there more than 50,000 highly skilled immigrants who are either un- or underemployed who we believe could access better jobs and contribute to the key sectors of our local economy. There is a huge need for better integration, especially in the growth areas such as health care, accounting and STEM-related work.
Very simply, it’s very important to ensure that we’re creating economic opportunity for all New Yorkers because that helps to create a greater New York for everyone. Also, from a demand side, employers are looking for skilled individuals to help them grow their companies.
Obviously this is an issue of concern to many urban areas where there has been substantial immigration. The number of foreign-born New Yorkers is at an all-time high — more than 3 million — more than 37 percent of our total, which itself is close to the peak percentage reached in 1910, when 40 percent of the city’s population was born elsewhere. [By contrast, there are 40 million foreign-born in the U.S. but this is just 7 percent of the total U.S. population, down from a peak in 1940.] In the absence of leadership at a federal level — cities need to act.
[ph]
NS: What are you doing to fix the problem?
EG: In 2012 we started a pilot project called Immigrant Bridge to better integrate these skilled immigrants, which we think is the first of its kind in the country to address workforce and financial barriers to gaining employment. There are two components. The first is workforce development, where we offer soft skills training, English as a second language lessons, interview practice opportunities or job search assistance. Through three social services organizations we have engaged more than 500 [immigrants] so far, and 90 have already found jobs in their area of professional training.
The second part is a subsidized loan program [offered through Amalgamated Bank], which can help qualified job seekers with expenses that often hold them back from pursuing jobs at higher wages, such as child care, rent, more training or to get licensed. Our focus is always on the job.
EDC has invested $1.5 million for the entire program. We are tracking the data, but anecdotally we know that our program is important and that individuals are using our program successfully. We’re pleased with the results to date, but given the small sample size, we still need to gather more data to figure out the best way to expand its impact. A lot of these programs are really new; we are testing new concepts. We are really trying to be very careful to learn and measure.
MORE: Meet the Undocumented Immigrants Who Created an App to Press for Immigration Reform
In a Bold Move, Chicago Gives DREAMers a Shot at Summer Jobs
Who knows how long congress will continue to drag its feet on immigration reform, but luckily for immigrants across the country, local and state governments have decided they can’t wait.
From coast to coast, Americans are implementing their own reforms, including offering in-state tuition to immigrants, making it easier for them to get a bank account, or even passing their own (non-enforceable) immigration laws. The latest effort in this grassroots immigration reform effort comes from Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced on April 11 that 23,000 city positions will be open to immigrants who were brought here as children.
These immigrants, known as DREAMers for the long-delayed Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act that would provide them with a path to citizenship and access to higher education if it ever passes, can now apply for 30 mayor’s office fellowships, 500 city internships, and 22,000 jobs in the city’s summer jobs program: One Summer Chicago. To qualify, applicants must have been brought to the United States as children, have lived here for five years, and kept out of trouble with the law. The city will publicize the opportunities in neighborhoods with high percentages of immigrants.
“Chicago is a city that was built by immigrants, and I am committed to ensuring that DREAMers have the same opportunities offered by the city to all of Chicago’s youth,” Emanuel said, according to Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business. “We will open doors to support talented young people.”
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How to Get Inner-City Students Into High-End Offices
The teen unemployment rate reached a distressing 20.9 percent in March, according to Next Economy (a joint initiative between the Atlantic and National Journal) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number is especially devastating for kids from poor neighborhoods, who need work and already face significant employment barriers.
But the Boston Private Industry Council (PIC) helps fight the problem by placing around 3,000 public high school students in summer jobs that help them develop the skills and connections needed to secure a job after graduation. PIC is a non-profit that has been around for 35 years.
Rayford Laconte, an 18-year-old resident of Roxbury, Massachusetts, is one of the students who found work through PIC. Last summer, PIC garnered him an internship at Genzyme, a biotech company in Boston. After the summer ended, Genzyme offered Laconte a part-time, after-school position with the company, which he happily accepted. After graduation, Laconte plans to work at Genzyme again over the summer to save money for college.
PIC places students at organizations and corporations all over the city, from Genzyme to the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Joseph McLaughlin, PIC’s research and evaluation director, told Next Economy that the organization’s private-sector commitment is unique — and especially useful.
“We’re introducing urban high school students to professional environments. That has a payoff to employers as well, since they want to grow their future workforce.”
Throughout the school year, PIC also works to help students by offering resume and mock interview workshops, as well as advising students how to dress professionally and fit into an office environment.
Now that summer’s almost here, PIC and other organizations like it are especially important. Students in Boston and around the country who need work and aren’t sure how to get it could benefit from more programs like this one.
Can an Influx of Immigrants Bolster Michigan’s Economy?
Why are people so resistant to immigrants? After all, studies have shown that immigrants stabilize neighborhoods, and their presence correlates with a reduction of crime. Additionally, they are more than twice as likely to start their own business as people born in the United States, according to a study by the University of North Carolina. And a study in Michigan by the Immigration Policy Center suggested immigrants are six times more likely to start high-tech companies than native-born people are.
All of this is why Michigan’s governor Rick Snyder believes that an influx of talented immigrants could help reinvigorate his state. So he asked the federal government if Michigan could create its own visa program for immigrants who have the means to invest $500,000 to $1 million in starting job-creating businesses.
In April, the federal government approved the plan. Snyder told of Gary Heinlein of the Detroit News that the move is “an important step in helping harness top talent and international direct investment into the state to continue and accelerate Michigan’s comeback. Our state needs outstanding talent to help drive the new economy. Immigrants are net job creators.”
Michigan will open a regional center for EB-5 visas, an “immigrant investor” program that was implemented with the 1990 immigration act. Those who have a plan for a business that will employ 10 or more people in Michigan can apply for permanent residence. (Their family can also apply.) Projects that target areas with high unemployment will be have priority, and given that there 433 neighborhoods in the state with an unemployment rate one-and-a-half times greater than the national average, there are plenty of communities to choose from.
Snyder is putting a lot of energy behind his plan to welcome immigrants to Michigan to help his state economically. He’s also created a Michigan Office for New Americans, plus he delivered two other immigrant-related proposals during his State of the State speech in January. He’s hoping these new Americans will bring renewed energy and ideas that can return Michigan’s economy to its former powerhouse status.
MORE: Meet the CEO Who Wants to Bring 50,000 Immigrants to Detroit
The Eco-Friendly Action That Improves the Economy
Recycling has tons of benefits, from reducing the amount of trash sent to landfills to decreasing pollution. But if you need another reason to keep on recycling those cans, bottles and newspapers, here’s another incentive: You’re creating jobs.
As the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reports, California is a shining example of how recycling is actually doing its part in stimulating the economy. The state is currently trying to reach a recycling goal of 75 percent by 2020, and if it does, 110,000 jobs could be created, according to a study from the Tellus Institute, a non-profit research company. (If you think 75 percent recycling sounds unrealistic, California was already at 50 percent way back in 2011, which puts the state comfortably on track to hit its goal.)
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So why would recycling create more jobs? According to the NRDC report, “meeting the 75 percent recycling goal would create more than 34,000 jobs in materials collection, 26,000 jobs in materials processing, and 56,000 jobs in manufacturing using the recovered materials.” Additionally, the report states that these 110,000 jobs would create another 38,600 jobs indirectly — such as recycling-related businesses. The purchasing power of all these new green workers is also certainly going to boost the economy and spur job growth even more.
Just imagine what would happen if the whole country took a page from California and increased recycling on a national scale. A different Tellus report from 2011 actually crunched those numbers, and their findings are just as encouraging. Apparently, if the entire country recycled at a rate of 75 percent by the year 2030, we could reduce greenhouse gases by 515 million metric tons, which is the same as “shutting down about 72 coal-fired power plants or taking 50 million cars off the road,” the NRDC writes. Now that’s a huge incentive to go reduce, reuse and yes, recycle.
These Billionaire GOP Donors Support the Idea of a $12 Minimum Wage. Will the Party Follow?
Could common political ground between Democrats and Republicans be on the horizon? It looks like some influential conservative donors are shifting their ideology ever so slightly to increasing the minimum wage — a legislative issue that Democrats are pushing for as we near the midterm elections. In January, wealthy Silicon Valley executive and conservative donor Ron Unz put forth a California ballot measure that would raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour in 2015 and $12 in 2016. His perspective was this: raising the minimum wage would put more money in the average Americans’ pockets, which in turn would make them less reliant on government aid. Now Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and GOP donor, is weighing in on Unz’s plan, saying, “I actually think that it’s a very out of the box idea — but it’s something one should consider seriously.” Thiel, who has donated millions of dollars to GOP causes over the year, including $1 million to the anti-tax group Club for Growth and nearly $4 million to the Endorse Liberty PAC in support of presidential candidate Ron Paul in 2012, agrees with Unz’s assumptions that a higher minimum wage could reduce people’s dependency on welfare. “Given how low the minimum wage is — and how generous the welfare benefits are — you have a marginal tax rate that’s on the order of 100 percent, and people are actually trapped in this sort of welfare state,” he said.
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The idea of a minimum wage increase has been a hot topic of late. President Barack Obama called on Congress to work together to increase the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015 in his State of the Union address, saying that the move would raise the income of millions of working families. “It could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank; rent or eviction; scraping by or finally getting ahead. For businesses across the country, it would mean customers with more money in their pockets,” he said. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 — which is used in about 30 states that don’t mandate their own — translates to a $15,000 annual salary, which the President noted is well below a living wage in many areas of the country.
Recently, House Democrats filed a “discharge petition” in an attempt to dislodge their bill that increases the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, which would move the vote to the floor. While it seems unlikely that the petition will get the required votes, some Republican lawmakers have said that they are open to discussion on the issue. Others stick to their opposition, citing a bipartisan Congressional Budget Office report that says that raising the minimum wage would cost the economy 500,000 jobs. Democrats, on the other hand, cite another aspect of the same report — that raising the minimum wage would lift 900,000 people out of poverty. OK, so maybe legislators aren’t finding their common ground quite yet. But if there’s one certainty in politics it’s that politicians follow the money. If major conservative donors continue to push for a minimum wage increase, we might hear some GOP lawmakers singing a different tune.
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To Fix a Neighborhood, Invite a Newcomer
The idea of the hard-working immigrant isn’t just a stereotype according to several studies, including one by Paul McDaniel, who holds a Ph.D. in Geography and Urban Regional Analysis from the University of North Carolina. In “Revitalization in the Heartland of America: Welcoming Immigrant Entrepreneurs for Economic Development,” he writes that immigrants are “risk takers by nature” and “unusually successful entrepreneurs.” Immigrants are more than twice as likely to start their own businesses as people born in the United States.
McDaniel cites the finding of the Fiscal Policy Institute that “immigration and economic growth of metro areas go hand in hand.” That’s prompted several Rust Belt cities that are losing population and declining economically to look to immigrants for revitalization. McDaniel demonstrates that an influx of immigrants is helping stabilize and invigorate parts of Detroit and St. Louis, and rural communities in Iowa. These communities have seen the benefits of immigration and have begun to advocate for more—for example, the Governor of Michigan recently requested 50,000 visas to allow high-skilled immigrants to move to Detroit. Immigrants often move into low-income neighborhoods and make them safer and more prosperous.
David G. Gutierrez studied census data for his report “An Historic Overview of Latino Immigration and Demographic Transformation of the United States” and found that 44% of medical scientists, 37% of physical scientists, 34% of software engineers, and 27% of physicians and surgeons in America are immigrants. We’ve always known that immigrants are one factor that make the United States strong, and these new reports suggest we should continue welcoming immigrants in the future.
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This Ambitious Project Could Change What We Know About Oceans
The Los Angeles city council recently approved an ambitious project to build an extensive ocean research center on an unused pier in San Pedro, an economically depressed area. The project, known as AltaSea, will be a collaboration between public and private entities, including the Port of Los Angeles and several universities. It will span 35 acres of water and land, and include facilities for studying tsunami waves and other phenomena, classrooms, exhibits, labs and offices. The Southern California Marine Institute, which combines the marine studies programs of twelve universities, will be one of the first organizations to take up residence at AltaSea. The project will take 15 to 20 years to complete and cost $500 million, a good chunk of which has already been pledged by the Annenberg Foundation and private donations. The project is expected to generate nearly 8000 jobs for the community, and the gains it will make in our understanding of the ocean are incalculable.