Denver Mayor Mike Johnston (D) is announcing a new program that will provide job training, legal assistance, and English language education programs in an effort to assist migrants in leaving the city’s shelter system and finding employment.
According to NBC News, the city has already enrolled about 800 migrants in the program and plans to enroll more by the end of June.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnston told the reporters, “Our goal was to take what people saw as a crisis and turn it into an opportunity.” “There are people who are eager to work in the city with talent, skills, and discipline. Employers in the city are in severe need of workers and are eager to hire anyone who can fill their positions. Our goal has been to identify job seekers and provide them with training and skills relevant to the jobs that most urgently need them. Therefore, what we did was establish the nation’s first-ever asylum-seeker program.
The program’s participants, who were previously in the city’s shelter system, are reportedly seeking asylum, which will expedite their processing and offer them work permits in six months.
Johnston stated, “We will implement the new program over a six-month period, during which migrants will receive financial literacy training, work training, English language instruction, and legal assistance with their asylum claims.”
“Therefore, you already have the skills, the training, the authorization, and the certification to step onto a job on Day One and be a huge asset to a Denver employer,” Johnston stated in reference to the migrants.
The scheme is likely to hire more immigrants before they become citizens. According to CIS.org, all of the employment increases from 2019 to 2023 went to candidates who were born outside of the country.
The group examined the labor participation rate beginning in 2019, just prior to the pandemic, and discovered that as of 2023, 75.6% of men who were born in the United States and are between the ages of 18 and 64 do not possess a bachelor’s degree. That number is still lower than the 76.3 percent recorded in 2019.
However, both percentages are far lower than the 82.6 percent in 2000 and the 80.6 percent in 2006. Furthermore, the 1960s employed nearly 90% of the men in this industry.
However, compared to Americans, the percentage of immigrant men without a bachelor’s degree in the labor market is currently greater at 85.5%.
Even though numbers have consistently increased from COVID-19 lows in 2020, the group reported 183,000 fewer Americans born in the US working in the fourth quarter of 2023 than in the same period in 2019, before the pandemic. There are 2.9 million more working-age immigrants (both legal and illegal) than in 2019.
