Valerie Mills, senior program manager at Atlanta’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, is passionate about creating an inclusive metro region in which all people, including immigrants and refugees, can reach their full potential. Mills—a licensed mediator and qualified interpreter, who served as an international attorney in her country of origin, Ghana—has firsthand experience of the challenges […]
Massachusetts is home to some 82,000 African immigrants, many of whom are fluent in English. Overall, immigrants from Africa are one of the most highly educated immigrant groups in the United States. According to New American Economy, 40 percent of African immigrants have a college degree, attaining a higher level of education than that of […]
On July 14, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement retracted guidance that would have required international students in the U.S. to attend in-person classes or face deportation. Despite the federal government’s decision to withdraw the policy, international students outside the U.S. remain unable to obtain visas if their school […]
Immigrant doctors, nurses, and pharmacists make up more than 16 percent of health care staff in the United States. Another 263,000 immigrants with undergraduate health care-related degrees are in low-skilled jobs or are unemployed, a majority of them holding international credentials, per the Migration Policy Institute. The current crisis underscores the need to open pathways […]
In 2016, WES tackled a compounding issue: Syrian refugees were arriving in Canada by the thousands with high levels of education but struggling to return to work and school because they had little to no proof of their prior academic achievements. To address this challenge, WES launched the refugee pilot project to test the value […]
World Education Services this week announced its WES Mariam Assefa Fund has awarded $1.2 million in grants toward its goal of catalyzing economic opportunities and advancement for immigrants and refugees in the U.S. and Canada. The grants have been awarded to five organizations in the U.S.: the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, JFF […]
In June WES Global Talent Bridge, its national partners, and the community cohorts in the Skilled Immigrant Integration Program (SIIP) participated in a working cross-border conference in Toronto. The delegates exchanged experiences and learned from each other and Canadian models, including mentorship programs, employer engagement, round table collaboration, and microlending. Canadian participating partners included: Cities […]
Global Talent, an organization based in Boise, Idaho that helps college-educated immigrants and refugees connect with professional roles in the U.S., was recently awarded a three-year Refugee Career Pathways grant through the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Building on a regional partnership cultivated through the WES Global Talent Bridge National Skilled Immigrant Integration Program, this grant […]
The new WES Gateway Program reliably assesses credentials of immigrants displaced by conflict, environmental disasters, and economic turmoil when verifiable documents are not available. Almost 50 percent of the 47,000 Syrian refugees who escaped to Canada since 2015 attained college degrees in their home country, yet many of these individuals fled their homes without documents […]
Photo: The 2018 conference of the WC2 University Network at Ryerson University. Photo by Aurore Hochard. There is a felt shift in the public discourse on immigration across North America as ‘irregular migration’ joins our common lexicon and immigration increasingly becomes a topic of debate. The Honourable Ratna Omidvar, C.M., O.Ont., independent senator for […]
In 2017, WES undertook a number of initiatives to empower skilled immigrants and international students. Along with providing thousands of credential evaluations, the organization built the foundation for offering blockchain-based digital badges to its customers, approved the creation of a philanthropic fund to accelerate efforts to help skilled immigrants integrate into the workforce, and conducted […]
With the launch of the new Global Talent Bridge landing page on the World Education Services website, we want to engage visitors with robust content that reveals the breadth of our focus areas — at a glance. Features of the new site include recent blog posts; a list of tools, including webinars and training endeavors; […]
