Episode 93: How Utah is better connecting employers with immigrant talent

BAL Immigration Report – 10.03
FINAL TRANSCRIPT

Episode 93: How Utah is better connecting employers with immigrant talent

This episode of the BAL Immigration Report is brought to you by BAL, the corporate immigration law firm that powers human achievement through immigration expertise, people-centered client services and innovative technology. Learn more at BAL.com.

In this week’s episode, BAL’s Jeff Joseph discusses Utah’s latest immigrant integration initiatives focused on global talent with program director Natalie El-Deiry. Plus, the latest immigration news.

From Dallas, Texas, I’m Rebecca Sanabria.

According to a recent American Immigration Council study, immigrants make up 11.8% of Utah’s labor force, accounting for 10.6% of the state’s STEM workers and 20.5% of its construction force.*

With nearly 300,000 immigrants residing in Utah, many are eligible to help bridge the growing workforce gap in one of the country’s fastest growing states — provided they can effectively integrate into the workforce.**

Jeff Joseph, a partner in BAL’s Denver office, sat down with Natalie El-Deiry, the Director of Immigration and Integration in the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity, to discuss the department’s immigrant integration initiatives and the vital role she plays in helping Utah’s new Americans find gainful employment.

Joseph: I am really excited today to have a guest that I have worked with in the past on a couple of different events.

El-Deiry: Thanks so much for the invitation to join and to talk a little bit about the work that we’re doing in Utah. My name is Natalie El-Deiry and I’m the Director of Immigration and Integration in the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity. This is an inaugural role — the state of Utah has never had a position like mine before — but I have the great pleasure of helping to lead out in the state around issues related to immigration, specifically focused on global talent, but other immigrant integration initiatives as well.

Joseph: I’m always curious about how people’s journeys, you know, lead them to the path that they’re currently on. So how did your journey lead you to your position that you have now?

El-Deiry: I was actually just sharing this with someone recently. My first job out of college was actually in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I worked for the school district up there. And as people may know, there’s a large migrant community there that works with the agriculture sector, both in Fort Collins and kind of Northern Colorado area.

My job was to knock door to door on migrant families’ houses and ask them what it would take for them to get more engaged in their students’ education. What are some of the ways that the school could offer assistance to invite parents into the school to be part of the community? And that really started my journey in the work that I get to do now.

From there, I worked in public administration and in nonprofit sectors, all with the lens around working with immigrant communities and refugees. I had a good stint with the International Rescue Committee for a little over 10 years before coming over to the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity. It’s really been a journey that has married both my personal family’s history and our journey to the United States, coupled with my professional skills and a career that I’m really proud of.

Joseph: Hearing that kind of mission and drive is really, really inspiring. You said this is an inaugural year, inaugural role for the Governor’s Office. Tell me, how did this come about? And what’s the mission of the office? What do you all do?

El-Deiry: The office actually started in the 2021 legislative session, where our state legislature passed a bill that allowed the Governor’s Office of Economic Opportunity to start an immigration assistance center, is what it was originally called.

The charge was to help businesses navigate foreign labor processes. It was a very broad charge. This is what your mandate is — the one piece of it is that it was an unfunded mandate. So it was like, “Hey, Governor’s Office, you get to take this on, but there’s no money to go with it.”

And then the second part of that mandate was that it was so narrow — well, broad, but very narrow in the sense of the type of assistance that could be provided was limited. We’re not attorneys on staff. There’s only so much that you can do. It really allowed us the opportunity to look more broadly at how we could be more comprehensive in this work around both supporting businesses and helping them understand what some of the global talent pathways are — the visas that are available and navigating some of the kinds of nuances of that space — coupled with looking at our existing immigrant communities, the assets that they bring, the contributions that they make, and how we can ensure that there’s pathways for existing foreign-born individuals to thrive in Utah as well.

That was about two-and-a-half years ago. We’ve revised the statute. Now, it’s titled the Utah Center for Immigration and Integration, and that twofold mandate is very clear in the statute. There’s the global talent pathways and there’s new American integration as part of the work.

This next session we’ll be revising the name of the center so it is the Center for New Americans and Global Talent. Iterations over the past three years have really led us to where we are right now.

It’s been a very interesting space to navigate, of course, in a red state and where immigration can be a politically charged area to discuss. But we’ve really been able to open some doors to good dialogue, to business and industries, interest in and support for issues related to immigrants and to immigration, and of course, lifting up the existing residents who are here now.

Joseph: Unbelievable. The fact that you’ve had so much success in a red state and the narrative around immigration and the contribution or problems that we have with immigrants is really critical. The fact that you’re really engaging the community in that dialogue is really, really, really important and really innovative.

I’m curious, are you partnering with other states? You know, this is to me a really innovative model. I’m wondering, are other states following this pattern and trying to attract good workers and foreign nationals into their states?

El-Deiry: They are. I’m part of a network of 20 other states that have an office that’s similar to what we do in Utah. Broadly, they’re known as Offices of New Americans, but each state has kind of approached it in a different way.

Some really focus on health and social services for immigrant communities. They’re in like a state agency, like Health and Human Services, for example. Others have a real strong economic and business focus like Utah.

I’m proud to say that we have several red and purple states who have joined the network, which is really kind of opening up this charge more broadly. Immigration should not be a bipartisan issue. There should really be a way to kind of find a middle ground that is a win-win for everybody, right? Business and industry need immigration. It’s part of the backbone of our economy, both nationally and within many of our states.

Beyond that, we want people to have opportunities to put down roots and to be successful and contribute as homeowners, as business owners, for kids to thrive and access higher education or other pathways to build their journeys into the workforce sector. So the red states and purple states who have engaged more in this work are more focused on economic opportunity, understandably so, but that’s our door to open up into larger conversations around immigration and immigrant integration.

Joseph: The win-win solution that it provides for companies, for the state’s income and economy itself, it’s a huge driver to the economy. I know that one of the things that you took on was the Utah’s New American Survey. Can you tell me kind of what that is, first of all, and any insights that you gleaned from what you found out in the survey?

El-Deiry: There’s kind of two pieces of data that we really look at to help inform the work that we do within the state.

The first is through the American Immigration Council, and they put out a state-by-state kind of snapshot of foreign-born individuals within states. I think all 50 states are listed. I encourage any of your listeners to go to the American Immigration Council website and look at your state so you have a really good understanding of where you’re at in terms of foreign-born individuals. In Utah, we have almost 300,000 foreign-born residents.

And while it doesn’t seem like a lot compared to other states with higher populations, it does account for about 9% of our total population, and this is from 2022 data. We know nationally that the number of foreign-born individuals and immigrants has increased pretty dramatically.

I’m excited to see where that data comes out in the next couple of years. But they account for about 11% to 12% of the workforce, as well as 14% of entrepreneurs, 10% of STEM workers and 20% of the construction workforce. We know people are here. They’re working. Most immigrants tend to be of working age. And so we wanted to peel back that onion a little bit more and try to recognize, what are the skills and the education that people are coming to our state with and how can we identify better pathways to get them either recredentialed, licensed or, at the very least, open up a door so that they can enter into the workforce that they left prior to migrating or to immigrating to the United States.

With that survey, we had it open for about three months. We had over 6,000 responses, which is pretty substantial for this type of engagement: 70% of them held a license to practice their profession or occupation. Over 80% of them had at least a bachelor’s degree and an average of 11 years of experience.

This is just such a missed opportunity for our workforce and for our labor sectors to not be thinking about how we can engage people more thoughtfully to get them back to work, to put their skills and their licenses and credentials to use, especially when we’ve seen such labor shortages and specific sector labor challenges with healthcare, with engineering, with advanced manufacturing or manufacturing in general.

So that’s where the survey started, and what we’ve been able to do with it has been quite, it’s been inspiring. We’ve had three pieces of legislation that have helped open up pathways for the re-licensing, which is helpful, but there’s policy and then there’s how it turns into practice. And it takes a little bit of time for that practice to kind of keep up with the demand. But then beyond that, we’ve been able to use it with industry and business and say, “Hey, there’s a workforce here. What can we do to help bridge that workforce for you?”

Joseph: Can you give us some examples of how those solutions have played out in the marketplace? Does it mean that it’s easier to get your foreign license or credential evaluated? How does it work? How is it working out?

El-Deiry: For the credentials themselves, there’s national credential evaluation companies. Many of them are sector specific. Utilizing those is definitely instrumental and really important.

But when it comes to the re-licensure or last licensure, it’s in many cases offering like a provisional license — like, here’s your credentials, here’s your work experience. This is how it compares to what our licensure requirements are in the state of Utah. How can we meet you where you’re at with that licensure?

A lot of times it’s a provisional license where they can go to a workplace and demonstrate their skills or they’re under the supervision of someone. So it’s not quite full licensure. In some cases it might be, but generally speaking, it’s kind of a provisional license that people are offered while they work on demonstrating their skills or capacity. Obviously, licensure is a tricky space because we want to make sure that the public is safe, right? They’re licensed for a reason. They’re supervised and monitored for a reason.

When we’re pulling in internationally trained professionals, we just need to make sure that their skills, education and training match what the expectations would be for anybody else that’s licensed. There’s some different tools that our Department of Commerce and our professional licensing team use to help ensure that there’s an equal match in terms of education experience and what we need here.

Joseph: Obviously, the population that’s going to listen to this podcast and be most interested in are going to be interested in sort of the business side of immigration, corporations and also immigration lawyers that practice. Do you have any examples of companies that are based in Utah that have taken advantage of your programs and what you have to offer and how companies can benefit from what you do?

El-Deiry: There’s a couple of things that we’ve done around bridging events (is what we call them). We have sector-specific events where we’ll bring together different employers. We’ve done them around advanced manufacturing, around healthcare and around teachers and the school districts that have teacher shortages.

We bring together the immigrant population who are work authorized and have experience. Maybe their English needs some work or there’s some other barriers to entry, but we put them together with those industry professionals and the businesses, primarily HR departments, but other folks within that company to help build a bridge between the two: “Here’s what we expect. Here’s what you need to know. Here’s what it would take to get your foot in the door with our company.”

The immigrant population or the foreign training population, they have a chance to build a face-to-face network, which I think is one of the biggest challenges. That also came out in the survey: “We don’t know anybody in the sector here.” There is some bias if you’re not a fully fluent English speaker. There’s challenges that people have to overcome. Then we also offer an opportunity for Q&A to help them understand what employers are looking for.

From that, we’ve had some pretty good success. We launched a project with what was formerly our Utah Advanced Manufacturing Association and they morphed into another organization, but they have a trained professional engineers and people with manufacturing backgrounds with those employers.

The other one is around education, where we’ve had great success with the school districts, getting people re-licensed who are teachers in their home countries with a license in Utah, primarily working in our dual language programs but in other programs as well. The events have been hugely successful. We’ve had over 100 people come to each of them that we host.

Then from that, we usually have about 10% to 15% of the people get either re-licensed or get employed. While the numbers are inching in there, I still feel very proud because it’s more people in the workforce, it’s more employers opening their eyes.

A lot of people may be here on different types of statuses or pending asylum cases, and part of that is also educating them on how they might be able to help people adjust from there.

Joseph: Amazing efforts. I know that with universities in Utah, you’re graduating a lot of foreign students who are entering the workforce. Is there anything that you all are doing either with those universities or other universities around the world to kind of create pathways for students to have legal channels, legal visas to come to the United States?

El-Deiry: That’s a great question. It’s a two-way street there in terms of what we can do as a state. First, we have a new initiative with the state of Utah that’s called the jump initiative — it’s the joint Utah-Mexico partnership.

We know that the TN visa, of all the employment-based visas, that’s probably one of the easier ones to navigate, not without its challenges. We’ve set up some partnerships with Tec de Monterrey to help us bridge students in their student mobility or career mobility programs with business and industry in in Utah.

That’s been really great because we have students — some of them who have been alumni, some might have work experience, pretty much fully bilingual — ready to come work. Because it’s a younger population, they may not have the ties to family or some of the other challenges that would prohibit somebody else from coming on a TN visa to come and work. There’s so much opportunity with that visa specifically. That’s one way we’ve been working with international universities.

On the other side, we’re educating international students in all of our universities in Utah. While there are limits at the federal level in terms of what we can do or can happen around retaining international students, there is the OPT extension and the H-1B. There are some pathways that exist there to allow employers to retain international student talents, especially in the innovation entrepreneurship space. There’s more and more that’s coming out in that area that can help businesses recognize where they might be able to retain some of those international students.

A lot of students, while it’s not their primary intent to stay, recognize that there’s really great opportunities here, get skills that they can gain, take them to their home country after gaining just a little bit more experience in the United States.

It’s a win-win for those countries to have people who are coming back home with that much more work experience and for the employer and then potentially for others to be able to adjust and get on a path to a green card and really put down roots and contribute.

Joseph: Congratulations truly for what you all have created in making Utah such a welcoming state for foreign national workers and for companies that are willing and able to hire them.

What’s in the future for you? What’s on the horizon for your office, and what are you looking forward to next?

El-Deiry: I have so many ideas, so much more that we could do in this phase. We’ll continue to educate employers and businesses on what some of the different employment-based visa pathways are that exist.

There’s more and more coming out of the administration just recently around D-3 for DACA and some of the parole in place, so continuing to make sure that people are aware of what’s happening in the immigration space is of the utmost importance for us. Not that we’re advocating for one or the other, but just providing as much education as possible for people to make good decisions for themselves.

And then more broadly, we have some different initiatives that are getting ready to launch. One is around naturalization, which is called the Utah Citizenship Initiative. We have a network of nonprofit legal service providers and other people who provide citizenship preparation education that we’ve put together to create a digital platform for people around the state to be able to do their N-400 as well as engage in a 12-week course to make sure that they’re prepared for the exam and the interview. That’s launching in October and really focused on rural Utah because there’s a good amount of services in Salt Lake County, but once you get out of our area, it’s really limited for folks. Hoping to do more in the international student space overall and potentially help businesses offset the cost for some of their employment-based visa petitions and applications.

Joseph: How can employers or nonprofits or lawyers, how can they reach out to you and partner with you and access your organization and services?

El-Deiry: The best way to do that is with our website, business.utah.gov/immigration. You can access the survey report and learn a lot more about the work that we do and sign up for our newsletter because that’s where we send out invitations for all of our events, for all of the webinars that we host and general updates on what’s happening with the center overall.

Joseph: Natalie, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you taking this time.

El-Deiry: It’s my pleasure. Thanks, Jeff.

Find more expert insights on employment-based immigration issues on bal.com.

And now, the top U.S. and global immigration news.

Registration for the Diversity Visa Program for fiscal year 2026 is now open through Nov. 5, 2024, noon Eastern Standard Time. Detailed instructions can be found on the U.S. State Department’s website. Applicants are encouraged to register early to avoid website delays.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Qatar has been designated into the U.S. Visa Waiver Program. By Dec. 1, the Electronic System for Travel Authorization online application and mobile app will be updated to allow Qatari nationals to apply to travel to the United States for tourism or business purposes for up to 90 days without first obtaining a U.S. visa. Qatar will be the 42nd member country of the program.

In global news, Thailand is now the first nation in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Couples will be able to legally register marriages starting Jan. 22, 2025. Further policy adjustments within immigration and employment agencies are expected to ensure consistency.

In New Zealand, the government has extended the maximum duration for work and visitor visas from two years to three years for partners of New Zealand citizens or residence-class visa holders.

Also, recent changes to New Zealand’s Accredited Employer Work Visa will offer new exemptions to the minimum skill requirements for certain sectors, including the meat and seafood processing, tourism and hospitality and care workforce sectors.

Find all of our news at BAL.com/news. Follow us on X at @BAL_Immigration. And sign up to receive daily immigration updates in your inbox at BAL.com/newsletter.

We’ll be back next week with more insights from the world of corporate immigration.

I’m Rebecca Sanabria. Thanks for listening.

* https://map.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/locations/utah/

** https://business.utah.gov/immigration/new-americans-survey-reveals-their-experiences/ 

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The BAL Immigration Report is provided by BAL. Copyright 2024 Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP. All rights reserved. Digital redistribution to the public is permitted only with express written permission of Berry Appleman & Leiden LLP. This report does not constitute legal advice or create an attorney-client relationship. Visit bal.com for more information.