Lawrence McCullough: Community colleges can accelerate immigrant assimilation

The fundamental immigration problem America needs to solve is not how to keep people out but how to more successfully and rapidly integrate them when they arrive.

America’s community colleges are uniquely well-suited to play a vital role in helping immigrants become better equipped to achieve prosperity and contribute to their adopted land.

We can begin by bolstering two current strategies proven to accelerate immigrant integration: newcomer schools for youth and citizenship classes for adults.

Since the 1980s, many public school districts have offered voluntary programs for grades K-12 called “newcomer schools” that provide intensive education designed to help newly arrived students transition into the education system and American life.

For adults, thousands of citizenship classes are found across the country in a myriad of venues ranging from public libraries and schools to churches, community centers and private nonprofit groups.

Why not streamline the assimilation process by combining these two endeavors?

A coordinated nationwide network of “New Citizen Schools” would provide immigrants of any age with the basic information they need to become more productive Americans more quickly.

The schools could be housed within the existing educational structure of the nation’s nearly 1,200 community colleges that already offer quality ESL classes and job training programs as well as an ethnically diverse student body.

Funding would come from a base of federal, state and county education budget allotments supplemented by contributions from private foundations, American businesses and trade associations that profit from a large employment of immigrant labor, be it blue- or white-collar, high-tech or agriculture.

The New Citizen Schools would also work closely with a revamped Guest Worker Program offering immigrants what the GWP does not offer now: genuine access to education and economic mobility and legal oversight to prevent abuses by employers or criminals.

We hear commentators suggest that America must spend billions of dollars to secure our borders and citizenry. But fences and traffic stops are not the best use of those tax dollars.

The New Citizen Schools would lay the groundwork for real security: transforming immigrants into citizens who embrace the core values of the American social ideal as they strive to attain the American economic dream.

Those who complain about the cost of putting into place an expanded, focused framework of assimilation programs should consider what it will cost if we don’t have them.

The chief capital assets of a 21st-century economy are its people. America must have workers who are educated, skilled, healthy and — most importantly — emotionally committed to serving the national interest … workers motivated to add net value to the social and political system they share with millions of others.

The foundation for 19th- and 20th-century American economic growth was forged by a massive, decades-long investment of combined private-public funding for education, industry, transportation and science — powered by the human capital of immigrant workers from every corner of the globe.

A similar scale of concentrated investment should be applied now toward integrating the immigrant worker who embodies the nation’s most adaptable and promising economic resource.

Top-performing economies of tomorrow (which is already here today) will depend not just on raw labor but on the inspired, inventive business visioning of workers and entrepreneurs seeking better ways to accomplish more in a constantly evolving global marketplace — the visioning consistently provided day in, day out at America’s community colleges.

Lawrence McCullough, Ph.D., of Pittsburgh, is a former press director at Hall Institute of Public Policy in Trenton, N.J., and has taught at Community College of Allegheny County and the University of Pittsburgh.