Lack of Employment Opportunities for Refugees in America
PS101
7 April 2022
One of the biggest issues facing refugees and asylees in America and across the globe is the lack of career opportunities available to them. Whether it be because of the language barrier, discrimination in employment practices, or any number of other issues, refugees and asylees have a much harder time maintaining long-term employment in careers that pay them a living wage than other immigrants.
Upon arrival in the United States, refugees receive assistance adjusting to life in this country from non-profit organizations and private agencies as well as from the U.S. Office of Refugee Services (ORS), but the approach these organizations, especially the government, takes when resettling refugees is hyper-focused on the rapid attainment of self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t always offer enough resources to refugees for long-term success and, in the short term, is quite the low bar in terms of quality of life. Back in 2003, researchers from Cornell University analyzed the number of refugees that had received lawful permanent resident (LPR) status that year and found these people were more likely to be employed compared to other immigrants who were not refugees. However, by 2007, those same people experienced a decline in their likelihood of employment, while the employment numbers among non-refugees rose at a similar rate to that of the decline among refugees. The researchers argued that this downward trend is driven by a variety of factors, starting with how the federal government has increasingly relied on nonprofit and private institutions to help with resettlement programs, but “rarely” coordinates its efforts with these organizations. This is also affected by state and local statutes requiring local businesses to only hire non-citizens if there are no citizen applicants.
Money is another issue, in the decades since that study, federal funding for non-governmental refugee resettlement agencies and charities has almost completely dried up. Most nonprofits receive federal funding that is contingent on the number of refugee job placements they make, which drives that toxic impulse to focus on helping people become self-sufficient as quickly as possible. This results in many refugees getting stuck in “survival jobs,” low or minimum-wage positions that offer little to no career growth, often only require low skills and consist of manual labor.
Shoving refugees into these positions has led to what social scientists refer to as “brain waste,” when highly educated, highly skilled immigrants and refugees are unable to find work in their field in their new home. As of February 2022, the non-profit Upwardly Global estimated there were over two thousand of these people living in the United States, the organization also believes that between twenty and thirty percent of recent arrivals from Afghanistan are highly educated and skilled individuals who are being unutilized or underutilized in the workforce.
A good example of what this looks like on the ground is the current situation facing recently arrived people from Afghanistan in Alexandria, Virginia. Actors from the national theater in Kabul are now working cash registers, and former procurement services managers are case-workers at the same non-profits that helped them adjust. One of the biggest issues here is that even when the most qualified doctors, nurses, therapists, lawyers, teachers, and engineers are “skills matched” to an available position in America, the fact that they don’t have licenses to practice in this country, never mind whichever state they settle in, they cannot legally put their skills to use. This could also lead to systemic, generational brain waste, as people working survival jobs often cannot afford to send their kids to college or technical school.
In a country currently facing a severe shortage of nurses, doctors, technicians, and other medical professionals, something we all became very aware of over the last few years, we cannot afford to let this continue. The next COVID variant could show up at any time, and the best doctors and nurses Afghanistan and other nations had should not be sitting in a drive-thru window or standing behind a cash register. One way to fix this would be to set up ways for nurses to take the National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX-RN exam) at a reduced cost or for free. Currently, the exam costs $200 plus additional fees from individual state boards of nursing to take, something that could be offset by private resettlement agencies or done through government-funded non-profits. Obviously, this would not be as easy for lawyers as the systems vary so widely from nation to nation, but engineers, teachers, and other licensed professionals should also be able to put their education to good use no matter where they come from or what they can afford.