Upwardly Global and program alumna Vanessa Rosales were recently featured on BBC News Mundo’s article “‘Desperdicio de cerebros’: el costo para EE.UU. de no aprovechar el talento de los inmigrantes calificados de América Latina,” which discusses the issue of “brain waste” and the underemployment of highly skilled immigrants and refugees in the U.S., focusing particularly on Latin American professionals.
Key points of the article include:
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- 35% of immigrant adults age 25 or older possess a bachelor’s degree or higher, yet 20% of this population are either unemployed or are working jobs that require only a high school diploma.
- Over 2 million immigrants are underemployed, leading to an estimated $40 billion-annual loss in wages.
- Foreign-born Hispanic workers earn only 83.6% of the average wage of U.S.-born workers.
- The top barriers to skill-aligned employment for Latin Americans include language barriers and the time, cost, and complexities of credentialing/recredentialing.
- The most difficult professions to restart are in healthcare.
Speaking on recredentialing, Upwardly Global President and CEO Jina Krause-Vilmar shared:
“In regulated industries, professionals are required to obtain a new degree, credential or license, and that can take one to six years, depending on the profession. … Many immigrants who work more than eight hours a day, six days a week, just to have food and shelter, find it extremely difficult to obtain resources to cover the long and costly process of validation.” (Translated by Google)