Standing in front of a large screen showing a Google spreadsheet, Linlin Wang held up two printed copies of the page for her students to see.
“What we see here, sheet number one, is the first page,” she said, raising one piece of paper. “Now I want a different sheet. I can create a second sheet.” She tapped her keyboard. “These individual little things, little boxes, are called cells. On the sheet we have one, two, three — what are they called?”
“Rows,” a student called out.
“Rows, right. Three rows. How about these? A, B, C —”
“Columns, columns,” several people said.
“Exactly,” she said. “It’s exactly like this. Rows, columns.”
The quick introduction to spreadsheets came near the end of a three-hour class last Wednesday at The Welcoming Center, a nonprofit organization with offices near the Convention Center in Center City. Wang’s 12 students sat at a long table in a fourth-floor conference room overlooking 13th Street, peering intently at their laptops.
She also gave them a primer on Google Slides and helped them click their way through Google Forms, creating a questionnaire that asked invitees what they’d like to bring to a potluck.
Basic stuff, perhaps, to the typical American office worker, but for Wang’s students — all recent immigrants from countries like Vietnam and Mali — their free, thrice-weekly English for Workplace Communication class is a prized opportunity to accelerate their integration into American society and pave their way to careers.
“Teacher Linlin learns us everything is possible, everything’s easy,” said Rasha Farhat, an Arabic speaker who moved to Philly from Sudan with her family last August and is hoping to use her degree in laboratory science. “This is the first step. This is the important step, to take confidence, to face what is outside or what is around me. And this confidence gives me power to contact with people around me, communicate.”
Demand for free or low-cost English classes in the city far exceeds supply, but the nonprofit Welcoming Center and other organizations have been able to offer more spots recently thanks to a funding boost from the city.
That kind of support for immigrants is essential if Philadelphia wants to attract more of them, Welcoming Center CEO Anuj Gupta said.
While immigration policy is politically controversial nationally, without a steady influx of immigrants, the city would have seen its population shrink rather than grow over the past 15 years, and the local economy would have suffered, he said. The new arrivals remain essential if the city is to avoid losing its status as the sixth largest U.S. city in the next few years.
“We as a state, as a community, are not a place where we’re going to see a wave of Sun Belters from Florida, from Louisiana, from Texas, all of a sudden flocking en masse to move to Pennsylvania and Philadelphia. It’s not going to happen,” Gupta said. “There’s only one other pathway, and that’s through immigration.”
“So however you feel about this as a social issue,” he said, “if you care about the economic viability of your community, you need to get on board with this.”
Learning to navigate the American workplace
The Welcoming Center students are among the roughly half of immigrants to the U.S. who are relatively proficient in English. Many of them already have college degrees or other training. Other local organizations, including Welcoming Center partner Beyond Literacy, offer free English classes for new learners and people who are less proficient.
Some of the students, like Farhat, are focused on raising their kids or supporting spouses while looking to explore the job market. Others, like Samba Diaby, a native of Mali in West Africa, came expressly to complete their education and enter a profession.
“I decided to come here because a green card was an opportunity for me to learn new things in a new country and achieve my goal. My life goal, that was a computer science,” Diaby said. “I decided to take a chance and do my best.”
“I love this class,” he said. “It teaches me to improve on my skills in English listening, pronunciation, and writing, also.”
While the class teaches workplace terminology and practical skills, it also aims to more broadly acculturate students for their future jobs.
After Wang told the class to paste a Google questionnaire link into a Whatsapp chat group, Diaby wanted to know: Which is the more professional way to send a link? Via Whatsapp, which is widely used around the world, or via email?
They’re both fine, Wang answered, but email is probably better.
“For this class, the goal would be that they feel more confident navigating workplaces in the U.S.,” she explained after Wednesday’s session wrapped up. “They will be more aware of the cultural differences and how to handle different conflicts at work, or how to advocate for themselves, and also utilize some key digital skills.”
The Welcoming Center also offers an English for Job Search class, an International Professionals program, and other courses.
The city’s newest immigrants “probably need to learn some language, learn some tools, but they all come with a lot of experience, a lot of skills and talents. It’s a waste if they are not hired,” said Wang, who recalled struggling with English herself when she immigrated from China a decade ago. “What we’ve been doing is really helpful in kind of bridging their skills and talents with society.”
Welcoming immigrants to revitalize the city
Philadelphia’s attractiveness to immigrants has varied over time. It was top destination in the mid-19th century, a period when foreign-born residents made up 30% of the population, but their numbers declined during the 20th century due to federal immigration restrictions.
Immigration finally began booming again in the 1990s, and the new arrivals are credited with the city’s population increase of recent decades. Immigrants now make up 15.7% percent of Philadelphians, the largest percentage in 80 years and higher than the national figure of 13.9%, according to a recent Pew State of the City report.
In 2001, as a graduate student, Gupta wrote a report on how immigrants could reverse the population decline Philly was still experiencing at the time and revitalize the city. The report contributed to the founding of The Welcoming Center.
Then-councilman Jim Kenney also held hearings on the need to make the state and city destinations for immigrants, and as mayor he was an outspoken supporter and defender of immigrants. He launched a program to ease access to city services for people with limited English proficiency, sued the federal government to protect Philly’s Sanctuary City status, welcomed asylum seekers being bused from Texas, and worked to make the city the largest in the country to win “Certified Welcoming” designation last year.
“Jim Kenney, early on, at a time when no one in Philadelphia was willing to talk about this, understood that the city’s economic trajectory, if it was going to turn around, would rely in large part on our position as a immigrant destination, and to be that you had to be an immigrant welcoming place,” Gupta said.
Three years ago, the Kenney administration funded a new grant program for English classes and other adult education programs. Run out of the Office of Children and Families, it has a $1.7 million annual budget and pays for classes at a dozen providers, spokesperson Sheila Simmons said. The Welcoming Center received $242,000 this year.
“The focus was for classes in high-need areas, and tailored to community needs such as family literacy, English for speakers of other languages, basic education, and digital literacy,” Simmons said.
The Welcoming Center was able to increase its English teaching staff from two instructors to four and offer more digital skill classes, Wang said. It opened a second location in Northeast Philly, an area that has become a top destination for immigrants from Russia, the Middle East, Central and Southeastern Asia, Mexico and Central America, and other regions.
Mayor Cherelle Parker has proposed increasing the adult education grants budget to about $1.8 million in the coming year. There are still 10 applicants for every seat in The Welcoming Center’s classes, Gupta said, and Wang said she’d love to see further funding increases for courses and programs that bridge the gap between immigrants and employers who are struggling to fill positions.
“We [need to] have a kind of realization, mutually — society needs them, and they also need opportunities,” she said. “If more employers could be connected with us, we could definitely achieve our goals better.”
A months-long wait for class spots
Demand is also high for basic English classes, among immigrants and other residents. Beyond Literacy, which was formed in 2021 from the merger of two long-serving educational nonprofits, has 514 students in English as a second language classes in three locations and many more who want to enroll.
“We actually just had to put on our website a little pop-up that says that our waiting list for English language classes is months-long right now, and it’s going to be fall before we’re able to open up more, without additional funding,” CEO Kimmell Proctor said.
Beyond Literacy is funded mostly by the federal and state governments, and is the largest organization in the region funded by a federal program for workers with limited English proficiency.
It also receives $300,000 in city soda-tax dollars annually to run English classes as part of the Community Schools program that Kenney launched. In March the organization received a $2 million donation from billionaire philanthropist Mackenzie Scott.
Among its programs is a new collaboration with Temple University to train community health workers, Proctor said. Employers connected to Temple’s program have struggled to find bilingual workers, so Beyond Literacy worked with the school to adapt the program to teach bilingual immigrants and to recruit participants.
There are thousands of entry-level jobs in Philadelphia that healthcare, infrastructure, education, and hospitality companies are having a hard time filling, in part because the city’s native-born population is not growing fast enough to supply workers, said Proctor, who is also a board member at Philadelphia Works, a nonprofit focused on developing the city’s workforce.
“Those jobs are really opportunities to be filled by a lot of our English language learners, who often come with credentials and skills from their home countries, and just need the upscaling and English language from us when they get here,” she said. “That’s where we are really looking to take our students — from learning to earning — and place them in those living-wage jobs.”
Connections to employers can’t come soon enough for students in Wang’s class like Yufeng Lin, who came to Philly two years ago and is taking care of his son while his wife pursues a doctorate at Temple.
Lin said the Welcoming Center class has “absolutely” been useful in helping him adjust to life in the U.S. “It is different from my country — workplace communication may be different from my previous experience,” he said.
He previously worked as a component engineer for a telecommunications company in Taiwan, and said he’s trying to figure out if it would make sense to switch to a different specialty that has high demand for skilled workers.
“It is difficult,” he said. “I am considering if I need to change my field — maybe, like, a customer service engineer is for me. So I need to learn more, new technical [knowledge] and a new field.”
