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Urban Institute:
This profile of immigrants in the Louisville metropolitan area ("Louisville") is intended to help local officials, policy makers and service providers better understand the size, characteristics and needs of the region's immigrant population.
This report uses the 2000 Census and more recent data where available to produce a demographic portrait of the immigrant population, with a special focus on refugees.
Immigrants---also described as "foreign-born" in the report---are people born outside of the United States, excluding United States citizens born abroad to American parents, or in United States territories such as Puerto Rico.
Employers, elementary and secondary schools, universities, job training centers, hospitals and social service providers are among the many important public and private institutions that must grapple with how to serve this fast-changing population.
Louisville's immigrants are more diverse in their origins than immigrants nationally; they include large numbers of Latin American immigrants as well as refugees from all over the world.
Refugees are resettled in Kentucky through the Wilson-Fish Program, a public-private partnership that provides benefits and social services during refugees' initial years in the United States.
In 2000, Louisville foreign-born adults age 25 and over were considerably more likely to have a four-year college degree than native-born residents of the metropolitan area (33 versus 19 percent).
Latin American immigrants, the least educated group, still had a four-year college rate just below natives (17 versus 19 percent).
Even when they have high levels of formal education, immigrants often face other barriers to employment, such as lack of English proficiency and difficulty transferring credentials from their home countries.
Posted on December 14, 2006 05:32 PM
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