California: Learning English means a better job for newest immigrants

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Published: Friday, July 7, 2006

'It's helped my whole life' Learning English means a better job for
California's newest immigrants.

By R. W. Dellinger

Outside the tan stucco building with thick iron bars on the eight front
windows, a gaunt, gray-haired woman struggles to push a grocery cart
overloaded with stuffed plastic bags and blankets down the sidewalk of
Hawthorne Blvd. in Lennox. Inside St. Margaret's Center, back in a
makeshift room, a tall, lean, almost bald man dressed in a black T-shirt
and worn jeans is leading an ESL (English as a Second Language) class of
14 students. Eleven are women, a good mix of young and middle-age Latinas.
The three young men have their legs stretched out from the children's
seat-desks. On the green board is written: "Mr. Croom," and then below:
"Students will be able to discuss personal information."

"Simon says touch your nose," the Centinela Valley Adult School teacher
sing-songs. The ladies giggle, touching their nose. "Nose." "Simon says
touch your neck." Again, students carefully touch their neck and mouth the
word. "Simon says clap . . . double clap . . . good, triple clap." Next
Mr. Croom breaks up the class, sending six "beginners" to a nearby
partitioned-off area with a rectangular table. Cardboard boxes are stacked
high against the walls. The only educational aid in sight is a kid's
blackboard wedged between a refrigerator and water cooler.

After handing out a worksheet, with drawings and captions underneath, he
pairs off the half-dozen neophytes. "One listens, the other asks the
question," he explains. "You read, you write." Then he demonstrates: "Is
Otis in the bank?" "No," the group says. "Is Mr. Bascomb at the office?
No, he isn't. He's at the bank. Ok, is Nick at the garage?" A young man in
a baseball cap meekly ventures, "Yes." But the rest shake their heads. Mr.
Croom purses his lips and makes a face, holding out his arms. "He's right!
The picture says Nick's at the garage." The young man smiles, slapping his
hand down on the table.

Radical difference

One of the largest groups making up the nation's working poor today is
recent immigrants - especially those who have fled entrenched poverty and
government oppression in Mexico and Latin America. In 2000, there were
more than 30 million immigrants in the U.S., making up 11 percent of the
total population, according to the census. Many of these newcomers were
Latinos with no or very limited English skills. Still, they often find
jobs. Foreign-born workers accounted for more than 12 percent of the total
civilian labor force in 2000. In fact, foreign-born men worked more (80
percent) than native-born men (74 percent). But the jobs they land knowing
little or no English pay minimum wage, or even lower. The Urban Institute
found that although seven percent of all workers are noncitizens, almost
20 percent of all low-wage workers who support low-income families with
children are noncitizens. While 43 percent of immigrants have jobs earning
less than $7.50 an hour, the comparable figure for all workers is 28
percent.

In addition, only about a quarter of all working immigrants have
job-connected health insurance. And the children of immigrant families
make up one-fifth of the low-income kids in 20 states. The good news in
recent studies, however, is that learning English can make a radical
difference for working poor immigrants and their families. "English
proficiency isn't just helpful for immigrants' success in America. It is
the key to living the American dream," declared "The U.S.  English
Report."

The research-based newsletter pointed out that in 1999 the average
employed immigrant who spoke English "very well" earned almost $41,000,
nearly two-and-a-half times the $16,345 made by immigrants who spoke no
English. The National Immigration Law Center reported in 2003 that
immigrants fluent in English earn about 24 percent more than their
non-fluent counterparts, regardless of their qualifications. And the
Center for Law and Social Policy pointed out that earnings are "much
lower" for workers who don't speak English well. Perhaps the U.S. English
Report summed it up best when it said, "English is power."

Maria's raise

Maria Gonzalez is proof positive. For the last two years, the 49-year-old
mother of five has been coming to English classes at St. Margaret's
Center. And when she started, the immigrant from Jalisco, Mexico, had only
six months of formal schooling. "Before I didn't know any English,"
Gonzalez says. "Nothing. But I come here every day from 8:30 to 12:30.
It's a good place, and they teach you good. I wanted to learn for my job.
I am a bagger in a supermarket store.  This is my first year. "They wanted
me to know English to answer questions from people," she explains.
"Everybody has a question for me: 'Where's the bread? Where's the meat?
Where's the milk?" And she smiles. "Now I can tell them."

She works at a Best Way supermarket in the community from 3 to 10 p.m.,
five days a week. Before, she cleaned houses and babysat, earning a lot
less - sometimes not even minimum wage. But today - June 27 - is a special
day for Gonzalez. "Today was very good," she says grinning. "Today I got a
50-cent raise." Was it because of her newly acquired English prowess? "Oh,
yes," she answers, still smiling. "Mr. Croom is a good teacher. I like
him." After a moment, she says, "Also I feel more confident in my home
when I speak to my children in English. So it's helped my whole life."

Fear and loathing of English

Gonzalez is a "blazing example" of a core group of a dozen or so super
dedicated adult students at St. Margaret's, according to her 47-year-old
teacher, Troy Croom. They rarely miss an English class, and haven't for
years - despite enormous obstacles and distractions like large families to
take care of and little or no formal education. The majority of students
are less consistent. Many attend only a couple times a week; others drop
out entirely for family, work, health or other reasons. "The average
students here finished six years of school in Mexico," he reports. "So
they come to me 10 or 20 years later with fear and loathing of school, let
alone English or any kind of language acquisition." Helping them with
their concrete life struggles is what Croom's ESL class is all about. Job
skills. Survival skills. How to go shopping or to the doctor. How to read
street signs. How to understand their boss at work and interact with
others.

This is what he spends four hours on weekdays teaching at St. Margaret's,
three semesters a year plus a summer school session. Classes, like this
Tuesday morning session, are multilevel, meaning they're split into
beginning and advanced English learners, and hands-on, with the tall
teacher trotting back and forth between different groups, offering
one-on-one help to his students. "The majority of the work is trying to
find a way to motivate them to learn really simple vocabulary and get down
to basics," Croom reports.  "There's no Dickens or Proust or Blake here.
"It's teaching them how to survive in the work place," he adds. "And maybe
they'll learn enough English to better themselves to jump to the next
level."

A 'huge' step

Reaching that next level is what it's all about for working immigrants
struggling to grab a toehold onto American society, according to Mary
Agnes Erlandson, who started St. Margaret's Center in 1987 with the help
of two local churches and Catholic Charities of Los Angeles. "A lot of our
people work at childcare, cleaning houses - that sort of thing. And
oftentimes they don't even make minimum wage. So even though for some
people, you know, to be working in a supermarket like Maria Gonzalez
doesn't seem like a huge step up, it really is," she points out. "Because
once you're in the 'legitimate' economy, you have certain protections in
the workforce, and a working wage. So she can only go up." Erlandson is
always impressed with first-generation immigrants like Maria who struggle
tremendously to learn English, while their children pick it up almost by
osmosis.

She's also taken by all the women who sign up for ESL classes who have
never worked outside their homes and, as a result, have a lot of fear
about American culture. Leaning a new language is a big help in overcoming
that anxiety. The working families and homeless individuals who come to
the center for its English classes, citizenship processing, food pantry,
thrift store, counseling and referral services as well as rent assistance,
shelter vouchers and other services are hurting more than she's seen in
the center's 19 years of existence. Plus, there are just more and more
people seeking help at the center. She blames the ongoing crisis mainly on
rising rents in Lennox, Inglewood and Hawthorne, where there's no rent
control. "Between rent going up, gasoline prices going up, food going up,
your minimum wage doesn't cut it anymore," Erlandson explains. "So a lot
of the service workers who come here for [our food bank], especially, at
least one member of the household is working full time, and they still
can't make ends meet. We see a higher and higher percentage of their
income that goes to rent. Sometimes it's 90 percent."

St. Margaret's Center features four hours of ESL classes every day because
the staff believes so strongly that it's one of the most pragmatic ways to
help the working poor take that next step up the proverbial societal
ladder that millions of Irish, Italian, Polish and other immigrants have
climbed before. "On a daily basis, really, we see people who when their
English skills improve their jobs and whole lives improve," says the
veteran front-line antipoverty worker. "It just goes hand and hand."

http://www.the-tidings.com/2006/0707/working.htm