Untapped expertise
Immigrants with foreign degrees face obstacles finding professional jobs
When Neri Aguilar came to Houston, she found that a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and more than 10 years of teaching experience didn’t get her very far.
“Here, I live from selling pupusas,” Aguilar said as she handed an order of the Salvadoran stuffed corn cakes to a customer at the small restaurant she runs with her mother in Cleveland, northeast of Houston.
Aguilar emigrated from El Salvador after surviving a massive earthquake that caused the collapse of the parish school where she taught in Candelaria, in the Cuscatlán province. The
Feb. 13, 2001, earthquake was the second of two that El Salvador suffered in one month.
“It was enormously traumatic,” Aguilar said. “We had to help recover the bodies of several kids and the teacher.”
Like many Salvadorans who lost their homes and livelihoods, Aguilar came to the United States, where she had family. She validated her diploma, meaning she had it translated, authenticated and evaluated so it was recognized as legitimate by school districts. But while employers such as the Houston Independent School District were paying foreign firms to find Span
ish-speaking teachers in Mexico, Spain and other countries then, they couldn’t hire a qualified one such as Aguilar. Her tourist visa had expired and she didn’t have a work permit.
Aguilar called her situation “an irony of fate” — one that was detrimental to her and to the schools that could have used her skills.
Experts have another term for situations like hers: brain waste. It refers to when college graduates cannot fully utilize their skills and education in the workplace despite their professional qualifications. The phenomenon affects immigrants at higher rates, according to a recent study by the Migration Policy Institute, an international think tank based in Washington. This is the case even when their skills are in high demand, such as with health care professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic, governmental data show.
‘Sit on the sidelines’
About 2 million immigrants in the U.S. with college degrees work jobs requiring less than a high school education or are unemployed, according to the institute’s study, “Leaving Money on the Table: The Persistence of Brain Waste among College-Educated Immigrants.” Foreigntrained immigrants have an underemployment rate of 21 percent, compared with 16 percent for U.S.-born college graduates. Researchers estimated that brain waste among the foreign-born alone produced losses of around $40 billion in foregone wages and, as a result, around $10 billion in taxes annually.
“Persisting underemployment among highly skilled immigrant professionals documented here has taken place against the backdrop of a steady rise in the educational credentials of new immigrant flows to the United States,” the study found. Even though arriving immigrants have higher educational attainment and professional skills, they still have trouble getting jobs for which they are qualified. Forty-eight percent of recent immigrants held at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 33 percent in 1990, the study said.
The study cites the example of a foreign-trained brain surgeon taking a job as an Uber driver. The pandemic brought into focus the increased demand for health-related college graduates such as doctors and nurses while some 270,000 immigrants with health care training were underutilized.
“I had to sit on the sidelines for most of the pandemic,” said Dr. Susana Obando, a Colombian immigrant who came to Houston after graduating as a physician and practicing in underserved rural areas for a year in her country.
Systemic barriers prevented her from serving at the height of the pandemic, Obando said, though she is proud of the role she played as screening coordinator and the only Spanish speaker on a team for COVID vaccine clinical trials at a research center in Houston.
Obando, now 30 and the mother of a daughter with her American husband, said that she passed all the U.S. medical licensing exams but spent four years trying to get a residency. She recently landed one in Pennsylvania and moved there.
“It’s lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive to go from being a physician in your home country to being a physician here,” said Jina Krause-Vilmar, president of Upwardly Global, a leading national organization helping college-graduate immigrants restart their careers in the U.S.
The process involves many steps, from getting the foreignearned credentials translated and certified, to taking costly exams and finding a way to obtain medical experience in the U.S. in order to get into a residency program, all while doing something else to earn money to put food on the table.
Texas waste
While doctors such as Obando have to struggle for years and save thousands of dollars to pay their way to work as physicians in Texas and the rest of the country, the Lone Star States faces a shortage of doctors and nurses that will increase in the next few years.
Jeanne Batalova , co-author of the study and a senior policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, said there is “waste of highly skilled doctors and nurses who are willing to take jobs where they are needed but face obstacles.”
“And some of those obstacles should be reassessed” by policymakers, she said.
The shortage of physicians alone in Texas is projected to increase from 6,218 in 2018 to 10,330 in 2032, according to the Texas Health and Human Services. Internal medicine and family medicine are at the top of the list of specialties with the highest shortages.
Batalova said state and local governments should review and update laws and regulations, most of which were created decades ago under different market conditions and before globalization trends.
She applauded the pioneering law recently passed by the state of Washington’s legislature. The northwestern state will allow qualifying international medical graduates to practice with limited licenses under controlled circumstances while they work toward getting fully accredited.
“The pandemic has driven policymakers and employers to think creatively,” said Batalova.
But initiatives to mitigate brain waste are still small compared to the capital of college graduates that is not being tapped. She noted that time is of essence to make policy reviews considering that while Baby Boomers with a college education are retiring, more immigrants are arriving with a college degree that could offset the market changes.
Ali Al Sudani, chief programs officer at Interfaith Ministries for Greater Houston, a nonprofit that helps refugees transition to the U.S., said verifying the educational and skill qualifications of immigrants is important to maintain the quality of services that employers provide.
But the processes and resources allocated to incorporate highly skilled immigrants into the economy are due for a review, he said.
“The Refugee Act is from the 1980s, but we are still doing resettlement and services in the country based on the idea that these refugees are coming in from rural areas,” Al Sudani said.
Systemic discrimination?
The highest predictor of brain waste in the country, the study’s authors found, is being an immigrant with a foreign-earned degree, followed by being a Latino or Black college-educated professional, whether born in the U.S. or abroad.
Some studies have shown that mechanisms to search for job candidates tend to filter out names that don’t sound AngloSaxon, as well as graduates from non-U.S. universities, Batalova said.
Umberto Paulillo, a 25-year-old Venezuelan immigrant who lives in Houston and has authorization to work, believes he has been a victim of such practices.
“I have been tempted to change my name and the name of my university in job applications, if only to test what happens,” Paulillo said.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Universidad Rafael Urdaneta, a prestigious private Venezuelan university, and is bilingual. However, he said he hasn’t been able to get any job remotely close to his qualifications, despite applying for dozens of openings since coming to Houston in 2018. “I am a hard worker but feel completely wasted,” Paulillo said.
After working in several grocery stores, he said he is “appreciative” of his current manager at a Sam’s Club because “she promoted me to cashier supervisor.”
Thinking about the obstacles that prevented her from realizing her dream of becoming a teacher in Houston, Aguilar said she doesn’t like “seeing failures under a pessimistic lens.”
“Never be ashamed to try something even if you fail,” she said. “I have made a modest life, but knowledge is power (and) I can still teach the value of knowledge to my American children.”
“I am a hard worker but feel completely wasted.” Umberto Paulillo, Venezuelan immigrant who can’t get a job using his degree