Immigrant Professionals Have Built This Country for 250 Years—the System That Matches Them to Work Hasn’t Kept Up

As the country celebrates its 250 years of ambition towards a more perfect union, I continue to reflect on how the United States has grown into the world’s strongest and most innovative economy, thanks in measure to the talents and contributions of people from all over the world who live here.

The challenge for us now is how to carry our progress forward for generations to come.

At Upwardly Global, we serve as the conduit between work-authorized immigrant, refugee, and asylee professionals restarting their careers in the United States and the businesses that need them. From where I sit, I see clearly the juncture before us. While our first 250 years saw a significant population growth leading to GDP growth, by 2030 our nation will face its most competitive adversary: death rates will begin to outpace birth rates.

Today, nearly three million work-authorized, college-educated, and experienced immigrants in the United States are unemployed or working in jobs that require less than their education level.

If we do nothing, the next 250 years might well be a marked departure from the growth we’ve driven to date. The good news is that we have the means to mitigate this risk.

Our nation’s story was forged by immigrants building businesses, advancing new technologies, and sustaining communities; today nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Just since 2019, immigrant professionals account for 88 percent of the growth in our working-age population. But their economic impact has not always been recognized or mobilized as a practical strategy for growth.

By 2052, immigrants are expected to be the sole source of the US workforce growth. And yet today, nearly three million work-authorized, college-educated, and experienced immigrants in the United States are unemployed or working in jobs that require far less than their education, experience, and expertise necessitates.

Imagine the trained physician, with 10 years of experience abroad, who is now driving a rideshare in the United States. Research has estimated that this “brain waste” costs these workers more than $39 billion in wages each year, while governments lose billions more in tax revenue, and businesses experience billions in lost sales. Those losses appear in national statistics, but they begin with people whose expertise has become invisible.

Talent Hidden in Plain Sight

At Upwardly Global, we work with thousands of professionals every year whose circumstances are unique, but whose experiences in this country are similar: they struggle to restart their careers. These are doctors and nurses, technologists, and engineers who can close urgent labor shortages across multiple industries. Consider, for instance, that by 2038, we will be short nearly 250,000 nurses nationwide.

I am thinking of Santiago,* who came to the United States with a master’s degree in international politics and economics and eight years of experience as an international analyst at the Argentine Ministry of Defense. He had been working as a package handler with UPS until partnering with Upwardly Global, which allowed him to secure a position as an associate intelligence manager at a company based in Washington, DC, that works closely with Latin America.

I am thinking, too, of Shahpur Pazhman, another Upwardly Global alumnus, who used to fly Black Hawks for the Afghani Air Forces alongside the US military before fleeing the Taliban and coming to the United States with his extended family and small children. As of this year, the United States is short 24,000 commercial pilots, yet when Shahpur first arrived, he could only find work at a fast food restaurant. Licensing requirements for immigrant pilots are complicated and expensive. Even getting back on the path to this work is complicated. But it is not impossible. This is why Upwardly Global is so committed to helping immigrants like Shahpur, who is moving towards his FAA accreditation and will help address the pilot shortage.

Nearly half of the immigrants who arrived in the United States between 2018 and 2022 held a college degree. But as Shahpur and Santiago’s experience demonstrate, education alone does not guarantee that their experience will be recognized. International credentials can be difficult to evaluate. Licensing rules vary across states and professions. Professional networks must be rebuilt from scratch. Moreover, resume-screening systems may treat unfamiliar institutions, job titles, and foreign career histories as reasons to reject an applicant before a hiring manager ever sees the person behind them.

We Know How to Solve This Problem

Like many states in the country, Illinois faces a projected shortage of 6,200 physicians by 2030. To put this in context, 89 of the state’s 102 counties are experiencing shortages in coverage; in these counties, there are 3500-plus patients for every one doctor. The fact that more than 12,000 Illinois residents hold international healthcare degrees but struggle to practice, literally has life-threatening consequences.

In 2023, however, Upwardly Global worked with state officials, medical organizations, and advocates to solve this problem. The result was legislation that created a permanent, alternative pathway to full licensure for qualified international medical graduates through supervised practice in areas with unmet medical needs. A separate measure established an ombudsman to help applicants navigate the licensing process.

At its core, the problem is simple: communities need doctors and internationally trained doctors living in these communities are looking to help. The solution requires policy to connect the two, which is why 26 states and two territories have adopted similar measures, and why Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) reintroduced bipartisan legislation this year to help clear barriers between trained immigrant healthcare providers and critical positions that need to be filled.

It Takes Multiple Actors to Fix a Broken System

Legislation is one tool for helping close the gap between immigrant professionals and the jobs they have been trained to do. Another is helping jobseekers understand the hiring culture in this country and its requirements––everything from soft interview skills to AI-optimized resumes. We know this because, over the last 25 years, we have helped place over 35,000 people in skills-aligned jobs. We’ve reached this milestone by working with immigrant professionals, workforce development agencies, and employers to recognize and cultivate the abundant, but often invisible, talent we have in this country.

Fixing a systemic problem requires a systemic approach and a coalition of support. We need to continue bringing together employers, regulators, professional associations, policymakers, and philanthropists in partnership to redesign pathways that welcome qualified immigrants at scale. This is workforce development at its best: ensuring that talent meets opportunity and providing the conditions that make these outcomes inevitable.

Specifically, policymakers can modernize credential-recognition rules, continue to follow Illinois’s example and reopen opportunities for employment, and ensure that workforce-development funding reaches internationally trained work-authorized professionals.

Employers can review how they source and evaluate candidates, train recruiters to understand international experience, and examine the technology shaping who advances through the hiring process. The philanthropic sector can pair direct services support for jobseekers with long-term investments in policy advocacy, employer-practice reform, and responsible AI literacy. Systems change requires flexible funding and a willingness to support work whose impact extends beyond a single program year.

Finally, the nonprofit sector, especially those in the talent development space, should coalesce in support of solutions for current and impending talent shortfalls. Our ambitions are significant and unreachable alone; our success demands that we work together.

The 250th anniversary of the United States invites us to fuel the elements of our story that have driven our prosperity. Immigrant talent has always been central to that story. Just as much, if not more, immigrant talent has been and will be central to the nation’s future.

*Using only first name to protect anonymity.