The topic of immigration can spark different conversations, especially in the workplace.
The percentage of all US workers who are foreign born reached 18.6% last year, or over 30 million people, up from 18.1% in 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Immigrants and their children will likely add another 18 million US workers by 2035, according to Pew Research Center.
As the number of immigrants working in the US grows, leaders should be looking for ways to revamp their company’s culture, according to Ukeme Awakessien Jeter, author of ImmiGRIT: How Immigrant Leadership Drives Organizational Success.
Leaders can support a multicultural workforce, she told HR Brew, by having open conversations that entail asking questions like, “What is the immigrant experience in the US?” and “Do our employees reflect the customers that we’re serving?”
Jeter, who’s also the mayor and council president for the City of Upper Arlington in Ohio, shared with HR Brew what people pros can learn from her book.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What will folks in HR take away from the book?
HR professionals…will understand immigration outside of the rhetoric that’s on TV…[and] look at how immigration is missing in discourse in the workplace around leadership [and] biases. So, I talk about unique biases to immigrants…the foreign education bias and the accent bias…How can HR professionals recognize and minimize those unique biases?
What do leadership programs need to look like for immigrants?...I teach how to have curious conversations, and those curious conversations help with cultural intelligence. We had a period in HR where we talked a lot about teaching emotional intelligence…But how are we building cultural intelligence as we become a more global workplace?
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Where can HR pros start building cultural intelligence and understanding around the immigrant experience?
Start [with] curious conversations…What is the immigration process in America? And you are minimizing your experience by not understanding, “Well, how [does immigrant talent] get to your doors in the first place?”
Immigrants are not a monolithic group…they come from varied socioeconomic classes. They come from varied racial backgrounds…but the unifying experience with the immigrant experience is that rapid adaptability, the fact that they have to leave networks that they know and build new networks, that if there’s a language barrier, they have to overcome that…How do you use curious conversations to pull those skill sets out of the immigrant, so that you know how to develop it?
How can HR pros help leaders and managers have curious conversations?
It’s going to be different, depending on the organization and the journey. But, for me, it starts with, what are our talent needs? Here’s the reality, [more than] one in five people in the workplace by 2035 will be a foreign-born employee…You start there, and that brings leaders to the table to say, “Okay, how then do we navigate an environment where we have to integrate?”
Notice I said the word “integration” and not melting pot. So, our workplaces, in thinking about culture, [are] always like, “How do we get everyone to melt into this pot?”…We’re now shifting the conversation to knowing that we want to be a workplace that is conducive to all talent. How do we build a multicultural workplace?...Even if we don’t have it now, how do we start developing a culture to get there?