New MPI fact sheet offers first-ever state profiles of these workers
WASHINGTON – As hospitals in hotspots across the United States are strained by COVID-19 cases, an estimated 263,000 high-skilled immigrants and refugees with health-related undergraduate degrees are either employed in low-skilled jobs requiring no more than a high school diploma or are out of work. A new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) fact sheet offers the first state-level profiles of these underemployed workers, who are found all over the country, not just in traditional immigrant-gateway states.
These 263,000 immigrants and refugees, who majored in a health-related field (nearly half of them in nursing) as undergraduates, have been largely sidelined as a result of barriers including difficulty getting their academic credentials recognized and limited professional networks. These hurdles are keeping many from joining the 12.1 million U.S. born and more than 2.6 million immigrants employed in the health care field before the coronavirus outbreak began.
The fact sheet, Brain Waste among U.S. Immigrants with Health Degrees: A Multi-State Profile, uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Labor to offer a profile of where these immigrant professionals live, the languages they speak, their English proficiency, college degree majors and legal status. The fact sheet also offers an overview of policies in the eight states (Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania) where governors have used their executive authority to temporarily suspend or adjust licensing requirements for certain health professions, including for internationally trained health care professionals.
The researchers find that the 263,000 foreign-born health professionals experiencing skill underutilization (also known as “brain waste”):
Even as U.S. health care workers experienced severe job losses in the health sector in March and April amid stay-at-home orders and shutdowns, immigrants with health care degrees who are on the sidelines represent a valuable asset during a public health crisis because of their linguistic skills and backgrounds. “These highly educated immigrants offer both language and cultural skills that are not replicated in the current health care labor force,” write authors Jeanne Batalova, Michael Fix and Sarah Pierce.
Given that these language and cultural skills may allow them to communicate more effectively on sensitive topics such as disease and the movements and associations of a person possibly exposed to the coronavirus, the fact sheet suggests this talent pool could be tapped as contact tracers as states ramp up testing and tracing.
“With the disease spreading particularly fast among Latino and other immigrant and minority communities, broad demand for the kind skills that many underutilized immigrants with health degrees offer should be high not just in tracing networks, but in other emergency and nonemergency settings,” the authors add.
Read the fact sheet here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/brain-waste-immigrants-health-degrees-multi-state-profile.
Get state profiles of underemployed immigrant workers with health care degrees, including their race/ethnicity, legal status, degree majors, origin countries and proficiency in languages other than English: www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/datahub/MPI_HealthCare-Brainwaste_State-Profiles.xlsx
For all of MPI’s research, analysis and commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic, including of immigrants working in health care and other frontline pandemic-response occupations, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/coronavirus.