EquityBlog

A new report released today by Brookings shows that high-skilled immigrants (those with a college degree or more) now outnumber low-skilled immigrants (those with less than a high school diploma). Check out their chart:

But the trend isn’t playing out everywhere in America. While high-skilled immigrants outnumber low-skilled ones in the San Francisco Bay Area and much of the Eastern Seaboard (plus Ohio and Seattle), low-skilled immigrants still dominate throughout the Southwest and Midwest.

What does this mean for jobs and economic recovery in these communities? How can we get more skills to those who need them?

With the news that people of color are major audiences for smartphones, PolicyLink recently tried something we hadn’t done before. During the State of the Union, we partnered with tech start-up Survey Swipe to do a real-time, live poll of our network using a new smartphone app.

Though there were some bugs in the system, the overall response was terrific. Check out some of the responses from our network below (full breakdown available here). And click here to see composite responses from other progressive organizations who tried out the survey along with us.

We know that the challenges facing all Americans are often felt even more acutely in communities of color – from the obvious (immigration, education, incarceration) to the less obvious (metropolitan growth, climate change).

In our changing nation, these challenges may be different, deeper and more complex than the questions of overt discrimination that occupied attention in an earlier era.

For Week 4 of the Race and America’s Future Virtual Book Club, we look at some of the urgent challenges facing our communities. Today’s starter questions:

How do we better integrate immigrants equitably into the American economy and civic life?

How can communities of color work together to bring down the sky-high incarceration rate, especially among boys of color?

Where you live often has the biggest impact on your access to opportunity. How can we focus on the necessary work of improving entire regions without losing sight of the particular challenges facing low-income communities?

Thank you for joining the conversation today.

–Manuel Pastor

Great video from the US Dept of Education on the reality behind the DREAM Act. From the Dept of Ed’s announcement:

The five-minute piece profiles Samantha Hernandez, a sophomore at California State University Dominguez Hills, and shows the support she receives in pursuit of her academic and career goals. Samantha’s story is told in her own words, as well as those of her fellow students, faculty advisor, college president, and family members — all in Spanish. The camera follows Hernandez on campus and at home in South Central Los Angeles, where she lives with her mother and sisters.

Release of the video coincides with the signing this week by President Obama of a proclamation commemorating National Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) Week. The proclamation celebrates the unique accomplishments of HSIs and their contributions to the community. California State University Dominguez Hills is among the more than 200 HSIs serving more than one million Hispanic students across the nation.

President Obama has set a goal that by 2020, America will have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world. While today, approximately 40 percent of U.S. adults are college graduates, he has targeted 60 percent to give our nation the best educated and most competitive workforce. This goal includes graduates of both four-year colleges and two-year colleges.

The video is entitled, “La universidad: un sueño alcanzable,” (“College: An Attainable Dream”) and is closed-captioned in Spanish and in English. Watch it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DKxOPfSzak.