Skilled immigrants find hurdles in way of reclaiming careers

CHICAGO — The first time he applied for a medical residency in the U.S., Rafel AlHiali felt buoyant.

With nine years of experience as a physician, the Iraq native and recent immigrant to Chicago felt confident he’d be treating patients again soon.

He sent off the applications and waited. And waited. “First week, first month, second month. There was nothing,” AlHiali said. “I was really shocked.”

Five years later, after several failed attempts to land a residency, AlHiali, 40, works part-time as a medical interpreter while he tries to reclaim his derailed career.

Highly skilled immigrants like AlHiali often encounter a labyrinth of obstacles when they try to find jobs in the U.S., frustrating not only their ambitions but also their earning potential as they settle for lower-skill positions.

President Donald Trump’s support for merit-based immigration systems, like those used in Canada and Australia, could make it easier for immigrants with advanced educations and skill sets to enter the United States. Trump praised those systems for adhering to “a basic principle that those seeking to enter a country ought to be able to support themselves financially.”

But those already here say the expertise they brought with them to the U.S. often goes to waste. Lengthy recertification processes, language barriers and employers’ unfa-

miliarity with foreign credentials hurt immigrants’ efforts to find work in their fields. They take jobs as janitors, baby sitters and valets to get by.

The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization, calls it brain waste. Nearly 2 million college-educated immigrants and refugees in the U.S. are unemployed or working in low-skill jobs despite years of education and work experience.

Meanwhile, a growing share of immigrants is highly educated. Almost half of adults who immigrated to the U.S. between 2011 and 2015 were college graduates, up from a third who came from 2007-09, according to the institute.

The Trump administration has not made any policy announcements about what a merit-based immigration

system might entail. A White House spokesman said only that the president has tweeted about the concept generally. Trump sent a tweet March 3 that said: “The merit-based system is the way to go.”

The current U.S. immigration system prioritizes family unification. Nearly two-thirds of the 1 million legal permanent residents accepted into the country in 2015 were either immediate relatives of American citizens or sponsored by family, while 14 percent were employment-based admissions, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Fifteen percent were refugees or asylum seekers, and 5 percent came through a diversity lottery for people from countries with low immigration rates to the United States.

Some experts have reservations about a merit-based system.

One concern is that focusing on highly skilled immigrants

ignores the demand for lowerskilled labor, such as in agriculture, where employers say they struggle to draw a workforce. Yet even for highly skilled immigrants, the system might not be as promising as it sounds.

Canada pioneered the merit-based concept in the 1960s, but even there, more than 40 percent of highly educated immigrants are overqualified for the jobs in which they work, said Jeanne Batalova, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

Part of the mismatch — in Canada as well as in the U.S. — has to do with the strength of the local labor market, but it also reflects a need for community organizations to help both immigrants and employers navigate unfamiliar territory, Batalova said.

“Employers are frankly lost in terms of how to evaluate credentials, legal status, languages,” she said.

Some advocates for stricter

immigration applaud Trump’s support of a merit-based system. Highly skilled immigrants wouldn’t compete with U.S. workers for low-skill jobs, and they could have a positive effect if they pay more taxes and use fewer services, said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit group that favors reducing immigration.

Still, Camarota is skeptical that the U.S. needs such immigrants to plug talent shortages.

Wages haven’t increased for many jobs that employers say they have trouble filling, and many educated Americans have trouble finding work in their fields, he said.

Even if Trump emphasizes an immigration system based on skills and education, officials will need to address how easily that experience can be put to use.

Facing licensing tests that require hundreds of dollars, or having to repeat an entire

course of study, many immigrants with advanced skills take lower-paying “survival jobs” to pay rent and buy groceries.

Julio Godoy, 54, earns minimum wage cleaning the inside of airplanes at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. The job is a stark departure from his life before he immigrated from his native Guatemala, where he spent 25 years as a bank manager, earning about $3,200 a month.

Godoy, who has his green card, left Guatemala City with his son in 2013. His priority was to learn English so he could land a good job, but when his savings ran out, he took the airplane cleaning job and now works 60-hour weeks at O’Hare. That leaves little time for him to improve his English, which is barely better now than when he arrived.

“It’s a vicious cycle that I’m stuck in,” Godoy said in Spanish through a translator.