For more than a century, Lawrence, Massachusetts has been known as the Immigrant City — a place where wave after wave of newcomers arrived, took the hardest jobs, and rebuilt their lives within earshot of the Merrimack River mills that gave the city its reason for being.
Irish and French Canadians came first, then Italians, then Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and Central Americans, until today the city is 85 percent Hispanic and the storefronts on Essex Street are as likely to advertise in Spanish as in English.
Northern Essex Community College has always been Lawrence’s institution — the place where the children and grandchildren of those immigrants came to become nurses and electricians and early childhood educators. They came to learn English and earn credentials and move into the middle class. That mission has never felt more urgent, or more precarious, than it does right now.
“Many of our students live in mixed-status families, which is having a noticeable impact on whether and how they attend public events and access non-essential services, not only at the college, but in the community,” said Dr. Lane Glenn, NECC's president. “Our regional safety net hospital is seeing a significant decline in volume among the local immigrant population for non-emergency healthcare services.”
What Glenn is describing is fear. And fear, it turns out, has enrollment consequences.
Across the country, community colleges like NECC are navigating a paradox. These are the institutions most essential to integrating immigrants into the American workforce, and they are doing that work in a political climate that is making immigrants less willing to be seen. While selective universities retreat from international enrollment under pressure from federal immigration enforcement, community colleges — open-access, mission-driven, embedded in the communities they serve — have no such option. Their students are already here. And the work of turning that presence into economic participation falls, almost entirely, to them.
The federal policy environment has become increasingly hostile to the international presence in American higher education. The Trump administration’s moves to revoke visas, freeze grants at research institutions, and signal aggressive enforcement of immigration rules have caused four-year colleges and universities to hedge. Enrollment officers are counseling caution. International student pipelines from countries including India and China — long the bedrock of graduate program revenue — are showing signs of stress.
Community colleges, by contrast, serve a different population and operate under different pressures. Their students are often already in the United States. They are refugees resettled by federal contractors, asylum seekers with pending cases, legal permanent residents pursuing upward mobility, and mixed-status families navigating a thicket of rules that changes with each administration. These students do not need a visa officer’s blessing to enroll. Instead, they need transportation, childcare, flexible schedules, and instruction that treats English as a tool of economic survival rather than an academic subject.
Glenn says NECC has not yet seen dramatic changes to overall enrollment numbers, but he is watching something more insidious take hold. The college was forced to delay a planned scholarship program with the Ministry of Higher Education in the Dominican Republic that would have brought dozens of students to campus for one- or two-year programs, citing “safety and stability concerns.” That kind of institutional self-censorship, he warns, is only the beginning.
“We are vigilant, and especially concerned, about what the 2026-27 academic year might bring,” he said, “as the ripple effects of program participation begin to impact choices about whether to enroll at all.”
The Integrated English Literacy and Civics Education program, known as IELCE and administered under Title II of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, is the primary federal mechanism for this work. It funds programs that combine adult English instruction with workforce preparation, explicitly targeting immigrants and refugees. The program has never been large. The total federal appropriations have hovered below $100 million annually, with what Glenn calls “tremendous variance by state”.
Federal restrictions about who can be served, Glenn notes, “exclude, or deter through fear, many refugees, asylum applicants, TPS holders, DACA registrants, those in mixed-status families.” If fully funded, opened to a wider eligible population, and formally partnered with managing educational organizations like community colleges, he argues, IELCE could provide a foundation on which to build an effective national immigrant workforce development model. As things stand, it is nowhere near that.
The programs that community colleges have built to serve immigrant and refugee students are not remedial add-ons. They are architecturally distinct from traditional academic pathways, designed from the ground up around the specific constraints and strengths of adult learners who are simultaneously parenting, working, learning a language, and navigating an immigration system that may or may not recognize their presence as legitimate.
At their core, the most effective models integrate English language instruction directly into workforce credential programs, so that students are not required to achieve fluency before accessing career training. A student pursuing a Child Development Associate credential learns the English vocabulary of early childhood education in the context of earning that credential — not in a separate classroom, on a separate timeline, toward a separate goal. The language and the vocation are taught as a single thing, because in the labor market they function as a single thing.
Similar models have emerged in nursing, manufacturing, and food service across the country, often built by individual college workforce teams working with local resettlement agencies and regional employers. They share a common architecture: accelerated timelines that respect the economic urgency facing families without savings, and employer partnerships that create a clear line of sight from the classroom to a paycheck.
The research supporting this approach is, at this point, unambiguous. Glenn, who managed his region’s WIOA-funded career center for several years, summarizes the evidence plainly: adult learners with more than a basic foundation of English, clear occupational goals, stable schedules, childcare, reliable transportation, and strong employer connections through work-based learning benefit most from integrated models. Those with low literacy — including in their native languages — unpredictable schedules, and low earnings capacity while learning are most likely to drop out.
“These students are not waiting for a pathway,” said one workforce coordinator at a community college in the Mid-Atlantic region. "They are already providers, already workers in the informal economy. Our job is to credential what they already know and teach them what the American system requires."
Experts note that what makes the community college model distinctive, is also what makes it fragile. These programs are built on patchwork funding, notably federal adult education dollars, WIOA Title I funds, philanthropic grants, state appropriations, and in some cases direct partnerships with refugee resettlement contractors.
Any single disruption to that funding stack can unravel a program that took years to build.
