Integrating Immigrants into the Workforce

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Brigid Bergen: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergen from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom. Now we'll take a look at an under-discussed issue affecting many newcomers to our city and the United States. More education and underemployment. What do I mean by this?

How many of us have a loved one who earned an advanced degree in their home country, but have turned to gig work to make ends meet in the United States? Maybe you've had the experience of riding in a taxi driven by a former lawyer or doctor, or grew up with stories from dad who worked hard for his engineering degree but now works in construction. Perhaps this sounds like your story.

According to a study published earlier this year by the Department of Labor, 24% of Americans who hold credentials earned outside the US are either underemployed, meaning they're working in jobs that require lower levels of education than they received, or unemployed entirely. Joining us now to delve into this issue, its implications for our economy, and to discuss their work to help immigrants bridge this gap is Kit Taintor, senior director of the us policy and programs at World Education Services, and John Hunt, assistant dean for pre-college academic programs at LaGuardia Community College. Kit and John, welcome to WNYC.

Kit Taintor: Thanks for having us.

John Hunt: Good morning.

Brigid Bergen: Kit, I wonder, can you go a little further to introduce this issue of career education mismatch amongst immigrants? I mentioned that figure, 24%, of new Americans being underemployed or unemployed. Put this in perspective for our listeners. How big an issue is education occupation mismatching for immigrants here in the United States?

Kit Taintor: Thank you so much, Brigid, for focusing on this issue today, and to your listeners for tuning in. I mean, I think that this issue of skills mismatch of migrants and immigrants and the jobs they hold is one of the most important issues in the United States today. Yet, so often, it gets lost in the noise and the rhetoric around immigration in general that we don't focus enough on the ways in which immigration and immigrants benefit our economy and the ways in which we could improve that.

You mentioned some data for the United States overall, but in New York City, 43% of workers are immigrants, and they fill roles in industries like hospitality and transportation. These are industries that have long relied on immigrant labor. Academic institutions or professional regulators and some employers and others really struggle to recognize expertise, skills, and education gained overseas.

You mentioned stories about folks with healthcare education overseas picking up gig work, or teachers from other countries that are working the front desk at a hotel. This happens so often that it seems like we've become very accustomed to it, like it's something that we just think happens normally in our economy and in our community, and yet we're not focusing really on the ways that we can change that. At the end of the day, we're leaving a lot of talent on the table.

One figure that I think is really interesting is there's been a 70% increase in New York and the number of healthcare jobs that require bilingual skills and a 51% increase in the number of open jobs for healthcare practitioners. At the same time, 33% of New York's immigrants who have healthcare training aren't working in a job that recognizes that.

The issue is a big one. That we've got in our economy and in certain sectors, a lot of gaps in our workforce that affect all of us. We've got immigrants and newcomers in our communities with the ability and skills to fill those gaps, and yet the bridges in between aren't yet sufficient to bridge that gap in ways that benefit us all.

Brigid Bergen: Kit, why is that? Why is it so difficult for people who have this professional certification, this advanced education in other countries to transfer those credentials here to the US? Is this a US problem, or is this happening in other countries as well?

Kit Taintor: That's a great question, Brigid, and I think it's a very multifaceted challenge. One of the big ones is just that we lack the ability to recognize credentials earned overseas. If you are a doctor and you received your healthcare training and your license in a European country or maybe in sub-Saharan Africa, it can be really challenging for you to move mid-career and rejoin that job here in the United States.

Oftentimes, we force people to redo their residencies. You can imagine if you're moving to New York City and you're mid-career and you've got a family, being told that you need to go back into a residency to get license to practice can seem like a really hard thing to do. It's time-consuming, and it's expensive, and it's challenging. Would you want to do that as a mid-career professional?

We're not the only country, and New York is not the only state that really struggles to do it. A lot of countries like Germany and Australia are also looking at this. In the United States, credential recognition really happens at the state level versus the federal level. There's movements in different states to really try to do this. Unfortunately, Brigid, it's a state-by-state issue.

It's also an occupation-by-occupation issue. When you're looking at recognizing those credentials or doing policy reform, oftentimes we're having to go occupation by occupation and really look at physicians or accountants or cosmetologists one by one versus a full-scale sweep of things that can really ease that bridge or create that bridge between someone who's got the credentials to fill jobs and their ability to fill them here in the United States.

Brigid Bergen: Listeners, does this sound like you or a loved one that you know? Did you earn an advanced degree in your home country and now find yourself underemployed here in the United States? Are you in the process of maybe transferring your credentials so you can return to your chosen field, or did you give up because of the difficulty you endured in this process? We want to hear your story. Give us a call with your thoughts and questions for our guests. The number is 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692.

John, you're joining us on behalf of the NYC Welcome Back Center at LaGuardia Community College. It services people who are dealing with this issue. What have you heard from students about the obstacles newcomers face when they're trying to enter the labor force here in the US?

John Hunt: Sure. Thank you, Brigid. Yes, I work at LaGuardia Community College in our continuing education division. We have a variety of programs that serve immigrants, especially around English language services, GED in English and Spanish. We formed the Welcome Back Center because we were seeing a lot of these folks, internationally trained professionals, coming into our programs.

I think it's important to understand that these are not H-1B visa holders who might have been recruited to come to the United States to work in professional jobs. These folks are generally [inaudible 00:07:31] who have come on lottery visas or family visas and who are not connected to their professions when they come here.

One of the first barriers is that they're not really connected to any mechanism where they might be identified for the skills they had in their countries. They still have the professional degrees they have in their countries in order to connect them to employers that might want them and be in need of those skills, especially those bilingual and bicultural skills here in New York City. There's a great deal of obstacles that they face during this.

The first one is really navigating the re-credentialing system. As Kit said, it can vary from state to state. Often they have to go to some website where they have to figure out-- It's quite bureaucratic. It might be meant for native speakers. Part of what we need to be doing is helping those students, those clients, to really navigate those systems and understand the forms that they have to submit, the recognition of their foreign transcripts that have to be done in order for them to perhaps take a licensing exam.

For example, for nurses, they have to get their foreign education and credentials recognized and then get permission to take the board exams, the NCLEX exams here. They really need some support, because if you do that incorrectly, that can affect your ability to be able to get your board exams. A huge issue that we deal with, obviously, is English proficiency levels for students that are coming here. We do a lot of English language training at LaGuardia, and we found that internationally trained professionals are just coming into all of our different English language programs.

Generally, they're coming in with what we might call a fourth-grade, fifth-grade reading level. They're educated from their home countries, they have credentials from their home countries, but their English proficiency is generally a bit lower. It's very hard for them to immediately go back into their professions. They need some English language support.

Brigid Bergen: I want to bring in some of our callers because we have a lot of people who have either experience this are connected to this type of story, but I want to start with Annie in Queens, who I think has a personal experience with this. Annie, thanks so much for calling WNYC.

Annie: My pleasure. Happy to be here. Yes, I was listening to you guys. I'm traveling, but not driving. I'm also professor at the City University of New York, and I wanted to bring up the experience that educated people bring to this country, because in most cases, we have to pay the hitting penalty. We need to basically get new degrees in order to be able to work.

I'm a sociologist and medical anthropologist. I was very fortunate because I was able to go to the new school. I got my PhD at Columbia University, but unless I had those degrees, I wouldn't have been able to get a job at the City University of New York. This is not openly said, but this is the truth. I think that it's important for us to know that. In my case, I had already books published in Argentina, and I have collaborated collaborators in Europe, but unless I had a degree from the US, those credentials were meaningless.

It took me 10 years to update my credentials. I'm very happy, but unless I had the money that supported social capital, I would like to say to our sociology students, without those connections, without the fellowship, without the support, my story would have been very different. I will be cleaning houses nowadays.

Brigid Bergen: Annie, thank you so much for your call, and we're glad that you're here. Let's go to Carl in Staten Island. Carl, thanks for calling.

Carl: Good morning. I'd like to talk about a personal experience. I had a doctor who was at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan in the 1980s. He had done his medical training in South Korea, came to the United States, had to do his residency all over. As soon as he finished his residency, he was made chief of surgery in the surgical ICU at Mount Sinai at the age of like 40 years old, which is pretty amazing.

I think he's probably one of the best surgeons in the world. I know he's been written up. He's had like 50 articles written in medical journals globally. He literally saved my life at a time when a group of doctors, when I was brought into Mount Sinai, said that I wouldn't be alive by morning. He rushed me to the OR, operated on me like 20 times in two months. I spent two months in his ICU. I'm still in contact with him and we're very, very good friends. I just wanted to make that comment because it's a remarkable story and it's sad that he had to do his residency all over again.

Brigid Bergen: Carl, thank you for that story. We really appreciate it, and we're glad that you crossed paths with that doctor. I want to go to one more caller before I get you, Kit and John, to respond to some of what we're hearing, because I know you have heard these stories before. Let's go to Nikki in Harlem. Nikki, thanks so much for calling.

Nikki: Hi, can you hear me?

Brigid Bergen: We can hear you loud and clear.

Nikki: My mom came here in the '70s, I believe. Yes. She was an RN in her country in what used to be British Guyana, and they needed nurses. St. Luke's, which is now Mount Sinai on the Upper West Side, Mong Sinai, Morningside, I think, they recruited her, but she had to start all over again. She had to go back to CCNY City College to start another nursing degree because they didn't recognize the system in my country, which is she was trained under the British system. In order to come to the United States, she had to start over again.

Brigid Bergen: Wow.

Nikki: Four years.

Brigid Bergen: That's a long time, and that's a long investment. Nikki, thank you so much for that perspective. Listeners, if you're just joining us, I'm Brigid Bergen from the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom, filling in for Brian. My guests are Kit Taintor, senior director of the US Policy and programs at the World Education Services, and John Hunt, assistant dean for pre-college academic programs at LaGuardia Community College.

They both work with people who are trying to bridge that gap between the educational credentials and certifications they might have already achieved in some other part of the world, and now they're trying to enter the workforce and finding that there are many obstacles. Kit, John, anything jump out to you about some of the stories we just heard? I know these are stories that you encounter all the time.

Kit Taintor: Yes. These are very representative stories from Annie, John, and Nikki, personal stories of people that we've met in the course of our everyday lives that really stay with us, how many times people move to this country with skills and expertise and yet struggle, sometimes taking 10 years, 20 years, 30 years to rejoin their careers and sometimes not having the opportunity to do that.

I think about that both at the individual level that we see across New York and other cities, but also, like, what's the collective impact of that story time and time again? Oftentimes it is a lack of doctors at our local hospitals which require longer waiting times in our emergency rooms, or potentially New Yorkers who come into a primary care doctor and are unable to get the quality of care that they need because maybe there's not a diversity of language or background that's requisite with what they need to have culturally fluent healthcare.

Then you think about folks that are working gig work for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, they're unable to make a living, if you will, requisite with their skills and their training. What's that collective impact across a family, across a community, across a neighborhood, and across a city? Oftentimes when we hear these stories and you multiply them out, it's not just a story about a person, it's a story about us as a nation and our inability to capture this talent and this expertise and really power an economy that serves us all.

Brigid Bergen: John, I would love to hear your reaction as well.

John Hunt: Definitely, yes. I really like to react to Nikki's story. That's really unfortunate. That is nothing the case anymore, which I have good news for that. Nurses who have been educated abroad and come, been licensed abroad, do not have to start over. We want to make sure that that's clear. They can submit their documentation to what's called CGFNS to get it evaluated, and then they can apply to New York State for permission to take the NCLEX examination here, so they do not have to go back and get a degree in this country.

What we concentrate on is really doing some innovative programs called integrated education and training programs, where we train folks in English language. At the same time, they're preparing for the NCLEX board examinations. We've been partnering with the city's department of Small Business Services here, and they have been funding us to do these programs, which are intensive programs for nurses who are here in the country.

Generally, they've been in the country for about five years now, so they're really at risk of having their skills atrophy and not getting back into their professions when we are hearing from employers, as Kit said, they want bilingual and bicultural healthcare providers. We need those in the city. We partner with SPS to do this program where our ESL teachers, our English language teachers, are partnering with our nursing faculty on campus in these non-credit programs.

At the end of the program, the nurses can take the NCLEX examination, and when they pass the exam, they're able to get immediate employment. They're making around $100,000 a year really being boosted into the middle class after this program.

Brigid Bergen: Wow. John, just to be clear, these are programs offered through LaGuardia Community College at the New York City Welcome Back Center. Are these programs for free, or is this something that if a listener is hearing this, how do they find the information and what should they expect to pay for it?

John Hunt: Yes, they are completely free through that funding from SBS. They're also at Lehman College, our partners at Lehman College. We do evening classes and Lehman does daytime classes in the Bronx there. They can google the NCLEX program, LaGuardia Community College, the New York City Welcome Back Center, to find that information.

I also wanted to respond to Annie saying, another unfortunate of someone being educated abroad. Unfortunately, we are still seeing folks being advised that even if you had university education from your home country, you should go get a GED here in the United States so that you can have some local credential that an employer might understand. That is really unfortunate. Those folks should not have to start over.

Unfortunately, we need a little bit more education for employers and all around to be able to understand that foreign experience and foreign credentials are valuable, and those skills just need to be translated to the US marketplace. These folks sometimes need to understand how to do a resume, how to interview so that they can highlight the skills that they have from their home countries as well.

Brigid Bergen: Kit, you're coming to us from World Education Services, which is described as an organization dedicated to working with immigrant and forcibly displaced people to advance policies that would remove barriers for internationally trained workers to enter the workforce. Can you tell us what kind of work the organization is involved with? Exactly how does it helped these internationally trained workers enter the workforce? I know you mentioned how important English language proficiency is, but how much of that becomes a barrier to people getting into the workforce?

Kit Taintor: Yes. Thanks, Brigid. World education is a social enterprise. We work across the nation and communities and states like New York City and New York, but also other communities like Denver or Oregon. We work to both on the policy side to try to ease the policy barriers that might exist, especially in regulated occupations like healthcare, like accounting, or like teaching, but then we also invest in and support programs like the one that John is talking about.

We try to ensure that folks on the ground that are seeing this mismatch between education and occupation have the resources that they need to serve the community. We support a lot of the Welcome Back Centers in New York and across the country, and then also invest in those programs to try out best practices that might work really well in one community that then could be replicated or scaled in another.

The other thing that we do on our social enterprise side is we evaluate international academic credentials to allow people to showcase to employers or to academic institutions how to translate that international degree into something they understand. John talked a little bit about this. Generally, I think about this, Brigid, like a big iceberg. There's a lot of different challenges that exist here.

It takes all of us. It takes our regulators, it takes organizations like Wes, it takes our community college system, and it'll take employers to really think about the ways in which they can lean in to more efficiently capture the talent that immigrants and refugees bring to our community and put it into our economy and a lot of our high-demand jobs that really impact either our daily lives or our ability to grow our economy as a whole.

Brigid Bergen: Let's get some more listener stories as part of our conversation. Victoria in Manhattan, thanks for calling. WNYC.

Victoria: Hi. Thanks so much for taking my call. I have a whole bouquet of stories. I came here by myself from Russia in 1990. I was 20 years old, just to take a look. Then as my country was falling apart, I figured I might as well try it here. I had to transfer from my two different universities. I attended one and then another, didn't finish. I must say it was a full-time job just figuring out, besides taking TOEFL English as a second language, you had to have all your credits transferred and then translated into English, then applied to certain school.

I eventually did it. It took me probably a year just to get my credits transferred. I finished Hunter College in a year and a half and in communications. Then I managed to go and get a graduate degree from NYU, returned to Hunter College, and started their first new media program because that's what my grad degree was in multimedia arts.

My sister, who came by herself to Minneapolis, she was an electrical engineer. She didn't really speak English. To this day, she's a social worker in Minneapolis, and she's helping like old people who don't really speak English but are Russian speakers to help with their social services. My ex-mother-in-law came here. Obviously, she was older. She's a geologist, never even tried.

My ex-husband, who came from also St. Petersburg and who had a master's degree in applied math, he joined the company that already had offices in Russia, then closed its technology company. Nobody needed any transfers or accreditation for him.

I just want to make two points. I think it's very useful for people from their own countries, try to go to communities where their degrees would be accepted so that they can join a company without having to prove that that they're legit. Personally, I think it would really help if universities across the world would have this system of cross reference. Like if you went to school, the UK, it's accepted in the US. If you're a doctor from Nigeria, it's accepted here. We have that for high schools. You get the ID here, and then it's accepted in Europe.

Another thing, I think the main reason foreign degrees do not get accepted is because we are suing culture. Everybody's trying to sue everybody. Employers are very afraid that if something goes wrong, then the person is going to start digging in and be like, oh, he didn't qualify. He didn't have the US degree. I think that's the main problem. We should just really ease off on that and just like, try to help each other, people who need jobs and then people who need those workers who have the degrees but cannot work.

Brigid Bergen: Victoria, thank you so much for what I think you very- the lovely description of your bouquet of stories. We appreciate it. A lot of those perspectives, I think our listeners can relate to. Let's go to Kevin in Atlanta. Kevin, thanks for calling.

Kevin: Yes, hi. Good morning. I have an interesting story, I believe. It concerns my grandparents, who were immigrants from the Caribbean. They were Jamaican. My grandfather was a surgeon. My grandmother was a nurse. They immigrated to this country in the early 1900s. My father, who happens to still be alive, is 90 years old so it was quite some time ago.

My grandma nor my grandfather were ever able to function in the medical professions that they were practicing in Jamaica. My grandfather ended up being a brick mason. Of course, being Black at that time in this country also, I believe, helped to hold them back. My grandma ended up being a domestic worker on Long Island for decades. She was fortunate enough, she eventually became the domestic worker for a very famous entertainer, world-renowned, had his own television show, all that stuff, but still as a nurse, to be a domestic worker.

Then my grandfather, my father always tells me he can remember his dad always saying, these hands are for surgery, not for brickwork. That was just the story that I had from my father. I never met my grandfather. He passed before I was old enough to talk to him, spoke extensively to my grandma. She would share the stories about how over in their home country, they were middle class. Over here, there were domestic workers and laborers.

My father would share with me how his brothers and he would caddy at the country club. My father, being the youngest boy, he was a shoeshine boy outside of the country club gate, but my oldest uncle did go on to become one of the first Black deans at Fordham University. He also has books that he's written in sociology that are still used in colleges to this day. He made his parents proud. I have some other uncles and aunts that did well, but that one particular uncle really stood out. I just wanted to share the story.

Brigid Bergen: Kevin, thank you. Thank you so much. Those are wonderful stories, and we really appreciate you calling in and sharing them. Kit, John, I'd love to get your reaction, but in particular, Kit, I know that much of your work involves looking at some of the broader solutions to this problem of under and unemployment for immigrants. Certainly in Victoria's call, she suggested some solutions that could be implemented in terms of the education credentials, I'm wondering what solutions you were seeing that the Department of Labor or other governmental bodies could address to implement to address some of this issue.

Kit Taintor: Great question. I think a lot of the stuff that groups like John's at the Welcome Back Center and the community colleges are great and could be scaled for better reach. Some of our requests to the federal government is to learn from state and local community providers, and policymakers have really tackled this issue and think about how to scale it. It can be quite different if you come in with international training, if you come to New York or if you come to New Jersey or if you come to Pennsylvania, and so also bringing those folks around the table to really begin to tackle this.

Again, I think that a lot of this is fixable, and that is great. That's great news for individuals. That's great news for families. That's great news for us as a nation. I think a lot of what we need to do is just have a laser focus on this particular issue, bring people around the table, regulators, employers, federal government, state policymakers, and really try to figure out how we streamline the efficiency of recognizing and realizing the talent that immigrants who already reside in our community can bring.

Brigid Bergen: John, in our last minute, any final thoughts?

John Hunt: Yes. I think what was raised is really an important issue around the standards and protecting the integrity of these professions and making sure, obviously, that folks can do the jobs that they're going to be doing here versus bureaucratic barriers that are just up there that are impeding qualified folks from doing these jobs. Just even around English, what English does someone need?

They need to be competent to be able to do the job every day in that profession, but asking them to take some-- There's some TOEFL exams that some states force nurses to take before they can even take the board exams. Thankfully, that's not true in New York because it's hard enough to pass the board exams. You have to have very good English to pass the board exam. Asking for an additional English language exam to take before they take the board exams is unnecessary. Thankfully, New York State agreed about that.

Brigid Bergen: I want to thank you both so much. My guests have been Kit Taintor, senior director of US policy and programs at World Education Services, and John Hunt, assistant dean for pre-college academic programs at LaGuardia Community College. Kit, John, thanks so much for joining us on this show and helping people navigate what is a very complicated workforce entry.

John Hunt: Thank you.

Brigid Bergen: Thank you.

 

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