For more and more newcomers to America, Louisville is a gateway to opportunity

By Andrew Adler
Community Editor

 

U.S. Representative Morgan McGarvey could hardly have put it more bluntly: 

“The reality is that our immigration system is a failure of Congress. It’s not a failure of Democrats. It’s not a failure of Republicans. It’s a failure of Congress – and it’s been a failure of Congress for decades.” 

McGarvey, who represents Louisville as the sole Democratic member of Kentucky’s congressional delegation, delivered that sobering assessment during a Sept. 5 forum hosted by Jewish Family & Career Services. Titled “Refugees & Immigrants in the Workforce,” the 90-minute session sought to bring light to issues all too often shrouded in mistrust and misinformation. 

With that elusive goal in mind, JFCS convened a panel comprising four experts in this thorny subject. They were: Kristina Mielke of JFCS, Mandela Gapala of Kentucky Refugee Ministries, Amos Izerimana from Louisville’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, and Gabriela Salazar from G.E. Appliance Park. The forum, another in a series of JFCS “Community Chats,” was sponsored by District 8 Metro Councilman Ben Reno-Weber. 

“This is an important event,” JFCS CEO David Finke told his audience, emphasizing the vital nature of close cooperation. “Because collaboration, as Representative McGarvey pointed out, is a key factor in solving problems in our community…“I’d like to remind everyone that building a better community is a team sport.” 

As Finke acknowledged, during the latter part of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, the wave of Jews immigrating from Eastern Europe to America provided both the promise of better lives and the need for a prototypical social safety net. “This is where the Jewish Home for Children came about – they needed a place for orphan children to be taken care of. So, serving refugees and immigrants will always be at the core of JFCS, because we were all strangers in a strange land.” 

Indeed, “tonight’s event – the reason you’re here – is to engage in a conversation about what our community is doing,” Finke said. “It is our responsibility to ensure that individuals are treated with dignity and provided with opportunities.” 

The first order of business was to establish some fundamentals. “Over the course of years of immigration policy, there have been changes in how refugees are defined,” Finke said. “We, as employers, would like to understand the differences between immigration statuses – the notion of an asylum-seeker versus a refugee.” 

Panelist Kristina Mielke, JFCS’s career counsellor for refugees and immigrants, offered a baseline definition: “A refugee is someone who has been designated by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees as someone who is unable to return to their country of origin due to a well-founded fear based on discrimination (on the basis of) race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, sexual orientation, sexual identity and certain social groups.” 

Vocabulary here is crucially specific. “It’s arbitrary to throw out the word ‘refugee’ for every person who’s coming to the United States,” she said. “There’s a very large difference between a refugee and an immigrant. All refugees are immigrants; not all immigrants are refugees.” 

The nomenclature grows denser and denser: asylum-seekers, parolees, special statuses for Cuban, Haitian, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan individuals who want to enter the U.S. All too often, the wheels of bureaucracy rotate ever so slowly, relegating applicants to a kind of immigration purgatory. 

Employers have a special incentive to make sense of the immigration morass. The U.S. is replete with examples of companies eager to add workers to their payrolls, but who are stymied by regulatory roadblocks.  

 “Think about if you’re an employer, and you go through months, you go through a ton of work trying to get people through — and then all of a sudden one mistake is made,” McGarvey said. “It just throws all your work of hiring somebody into chaos.” 

It’s even more vexing to be on the other end. Say “you’re the immigrant and you’ve navigated the complexities of our system,” McGarvey posited. “You’ve tried so hard, you’re getting a job – you’re doing all those things. And the fear of one mistake could throw out all your paperwork and reset the clock.” 

Louisville has become one of the nation’s most diverse immigrant communities. By one estimate, the city boasts some 70 different categories of immigrants, including what is now America’s fastest-growing Cuban population. The phenomenon was the subject of an Aug. 26 New York Times article, headlined “The New Little Havana: Why Cuban Migrants Are Moving to Kentucky,”  

“According to independent estimates, at least 30,000 Cubans call Louisville’s Jefferson County home, with much of the influx having arrived in the last two years as conditions deteriorated in their country,” reporter Miriam Jordan wrote. 

“They now represent the largest single immigrant group in Louisville, and their numbers, which continue to swell, have helped offset population decline in the county of 770,000, according to the (2020) Census, as young Americans decamp to bigger cities. Many work at GE Appliances, Amazon and United Parcel Service, which have large operations in the area. The entrepreneurs among them have revitalized strip malls with new small businesses.” 

Elsewhere in Louisville, however, immigrant status is more tenuous. Talent in certain segments, unable to solidify their status as legal employees, may decide to move out of the area. 

“I think one of the key points we need to be thinking about is how to leverage the coverage that’s already here,” Izerimana said, “in order for employers to be aware of the workforce we are losing.” 

Gapala came to the U.S. in 2017 as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which for decades had been wracked by murderous civil war. “In my case, going home was not an option,” he told his JFCS audience. Eventually he found his way to Louisville, working first for Amazon, later as housekeeping coordinator for Omni Hotels, and currently as Kentucky Refugee Ministries’ employment coordinator. 

He faced numerous challenges along the way. At Amazon he typically worked from 5 p.m. to 4 a.m., catching a few hours of sleep, then going off to school. “That took a lot of time to adjust to,” Gapala acknowledged, “but it also introduced me to the American workforce and helped me integrate into society, starting to learn about this country.” 

Barriers are everywhere. Amid a nationwide shortage of healthcare workers, what Mielke described as Kentucky’s “archaic licensing requirements” prompt many immigrants to pack up and move to a more accommodating state – Ohio, for example. “So instead of focusing on trying to get their licensure here, it’s way easier to just drive two hours north,” Mielke said. The situation is even worse for refugees who may have been professionals in their home countries, but whose credentialing documents have been lost. 

 “If you were a female nurse in Afghanistan, they don’t exist” because the Taliban has probably “burned all your records. So you will never get those,” Mielke said. “That person – even though they have eight years of nursing school and they’ve worked for 18 years – will never become a nurse in the state of Kentucky, because (licensing officials) can’t evaluate their documents to the standards Kentucky requires.” 

Simply learning to speak English can be a confounding process. “Anybody who works with refugees can tell you it takes five years to learn English,” Mielke pointed out. But programs like those offered by JFCS are open only to refugees who’ve been in the U.S. for less than five years. “So basically, by the time they’re ready to start working in a career,” she said, “we can’t do anything with them anymore.” 

Alternative perspectives, however, demonstrate the advantages of a diverse workforce. “At GE Appliances, we have a lot of people that are from a lot of different countries who speak a lot of different languages,” said Salazar, a native of Ecuador whose family moved to the U.S. when she was a child. So, the company has partnered with JCPS and other groups to provide English-language instruction for new hires. “We want to invest in our employees,” she said. “Let’s talk about this and see how we can work together. That’s how our company started (saying), ‘let’s consider refugees, not just immigrants. And not just Spanish speakers, but other cultures, other people from other places.” 

Kentucky Representative Nima Kulkarni provided a closing political reality-check. 

“It’s very important to remember that when we say the word ‘immigration’ or when we think about the word ‘immigrant,’ we have a lot of different things that immediately spring to mind,” she said. “Whether you’re supportive, whether you’re sympathetic; whether you think there’s too many, whether you think they’re the wrong kind. Many of us in this country think first of the southern border. And that is because it’s what dominates the news. It’s what dominates our political soundbites. It is the impetus for a lot of political stunts that we see happening. That’s because immigration – with its time tested and proven ability to raise anxiety levels — has been used as a wedge issue in this country since the 1790s.” 

Far more productive, Kulkarni argued, is regarding immigrants and refugees not as a burden, but as a potential engine for economic growth. 

“We’re competing with Canada; we’re competing with Australia, Singapore, India,” she emphasized. “And we’re competing for talent that, increasingly, can be mobile and remote. So, the only question that we here can ask ourselves is: What are we doing to keep their families and their communities here? 

“Study after study tells us that any growth that we’re experiencing as a nation is due to immigration,” Kulkarni said. “The Congressional Budget Office projects that beginning in 2042, all population growth will be due to immigration to the U.S. Just let that sink in for a second.”