Skilled Immigrants a Brain Waste in Workforce

Michael Fix, senior vice president of the Migration Policy Institute, said the need to help immigrant professionals gain the requisite credentials and experience is particularly acute now that the nation faces the impending retirement of 77 million baby boomers, considered the most skilled workforce in history. In California, for instance, the fastest growing occupations are computer software engineer and registered nurse.

California also faces shortages of health professionals who can speak the language and understand the cultures of the state's increasingly diverse population. Latinos, for instance, make up 35.5% of California's population but only 5.2% of its physicians and 5.7% of its registered nurses, according to data compiled by the Welcome Back Initiative, a program primarily funded by the California Endowment and the California Wellness Foundation to help immigrant health professionals overcome barriers to practicing in the state.

Since its inception in 2001, the program has helped nearly 8,000 foreign healthcare professionals from more than 160 countries by offering courses, training, counseling and other services. The endowment's funding, however, is set to expire this year.

The migration institute report noted that competition for such professionals is heating up, with other countries such as Canada and Australia moving aggressively to attract them with better transition programs.

"The U.S. historically enjoyed the advantage in picking the best immigrants in the world," said Jeanne Batalova, a policy analyst with the institute. "But with other countries entering the race for global talent, the U.S. is losing its competitive advantage."

The report urged several new measures to help ease the way for immigrant professionals, including more language and workforce training, national coordination of credentialing criteria and three-year transitional visas to allow employers to "test the waters" with foreign workers.

The report also suggested an expansion of successful programs such as Welcome Back.

At Welcome Back's Southern California center at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, several immigrants huddled over a plastic arm sheathed in a tattooed covering to learn how to draw blood. Although all of them had drawn blood countless times in their careers, instructor Xochitl Manriquez was teaching them how to use the latest U.S. technologies. The class was part of their training to become medical assistants -- work far below their qualifications that would nonetheless get them back into the healthcare field.

The group included physicians from Peru, Mexico and Iran, radiologists from Honduras and nurses from El Salvador. They related, sometimes tearfully, their experiences of leaving their homes to come here and the difficult times they've had trying to reclaim their professional careers and identities. Some were pushed out by violence and poverty, others were pulled by the chance to learn advanced U.S. medical techniques.

Marta Martinez, a nurse from Mexico, said she had to lay carpet and sell flowers on the street when she first came to California more than a decade ago. She said she shelled out $850 to a private firm that guaranteed it could help her pass her U.S. licensing exam for nurses, but she failed. Like several of the professionals, Martinez said her big mistake was taking the exams before she had mastered sufficient English.

Manriquez, licensed as a physician in Mexico, assembled lamps in her uncle's factory in her first job in the United States. She passed the first exams required for a U.S. medical license but abandoned the process after being diagnosed with cancer. She now teaches in the Welcome Back program and does volunteer surgeries and other medical work in Mexico with two international medical organizations to "shake my frustration" of not being able to work as a doctor here.

"Human beings in the whole world are the same," said Jose Enriquez, an Mexican doctor who passed all of his  U.S. medical exams and is now applying for a residency. "If we can manage patients in our own country, we can do it here too."