Budget Cut Hurts Immigrant Programs

By Ali Bhanpuri

DOWNTOWN—Jairo Arboleda was 25-years-old when he emigrated from Colombia to New York City in 1978.

Arboleda, who worked at a shoe-repair store named Blacksmith, says his inability to communicate with his boss made their relationship very difficult.

“I was upset because I couldn’t speak English,” says Arboleda, 55, who owns a shoe-repair store in Downtown Crossing. “I could feel him watching me all the time—like he didn’t trust me. I decided I had to go back to school.”

After nine months of classes and listening to the storeowner speak to customers in English, Arboleda finally broke the language barrier. At dinner with his boss and other shoe-repairmen in the area, Arboleda ordered from the menu in English, impressing his boss and gaining his confidence.

“He couldn’t believe that I could speak English,” says Arboleda, who moved to the United States because of poor living conditions in Colombia. “The next day he gave me the key to lock up—that was the first time he did that.”

At a time when one in four Bostonians was born in another country, Governor Deval Patrick in October cut $1 million for immigrant programs such as English for Speakers of Other Languages and Citizenship for New Americans as part of his $1 billion budget cut.

The Languages program, part of the Adult Basic Education line, initially received nearly $32 million in the 2009 fiscal year budget, an increase of more than $1.1 million from 2008.

The city’s foreign-born population has “human capital deficiencies”—their workforce value is low—related to low English language proficiency, according to MassINC’s “The Changing Face of Massachusetts.” The Languages program’s purpose was to help build English proficiency among the immigrant population to increase opportunities in the job market.

The Metro Boston workforce totals 1.8 million people, of which 55,000, or 3 percent, have limited English proficiency as defined by the 2000 U.S. Census. The Census defines individuals with limited proficiency as those who report speaking English “not well” or “not at all.”

Thirty-seven percent of the limited proficient workforce lives in the city, according to a 2007 report by the Boston Redevelopment Authority and the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University.

“Learning English is very important,” he says. “If [immigrants] don’t speak English they can do something [in terms of work] but not much.”

Citizenship for New Americans, a program that finances organizations to assist immigrants in the naturalization process, saw $4,000 cut from its $650,000 total. The $650,000 provision awarded by the House and Senate budgets was only half of Governor Patrick’s request.

John Perez, 23, who works at Tequila, a Mexican restaurant on Bromfield Street, says the biggest problem facing immigrants is obtaining citizenship. He says government programs aren’t doing enough to help. Many of his family members have had difficulty in the naturalization process because of all the paperwork involved, he says.

“It’s difficult for immigrants to get citizenship now, much harder than before,” says Perez, who immigrated to Boston from Colombia as a child and received his citizenship shortly after. “Language is something you can learn, but your paperwork doesn’t always depend on you.”