Legal Immigrants Have Trouble Finding Jobs

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SAN FRANCISCO -- Oyumaa Kennedy thought for a second, and then she said it: "I would take a nap."
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That was her answer at an interview for an accounting job at a foundation here when asked how she would handle stress. "I didn't relate it to work," she recalls. "Take a nap! I was so wrong!"
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Ms. Kennedy, a native of Mongolia with a degree in American-style accounting, didn't find out how wrong until she met Jane Leu, a butcher's daughter from Cleveland and the founder of a tiny nonprofit in San Francisco called Upwardly Global. Ms. Leu may be the only immigration activist in the U.S. focusing on skilled foreigners who come here legally and then can't find jobs to match their abilities.

People like Ms. Kennedy are American classics: the Albanian doorman with a law degree; the Bangladeshi doctor who drives a cab. Well-educated and underemployed, they have populated immigrant families for generations, and more arrive every day as family members of citizens and permanent residents, refugees, asylum seekers and visa-lottery winners. Yet in a national struggle over immigration policy, largely driven by issues of unskilled and undocumented workers, they are the invisible bystanders.
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" Y' \8 Y# j3 [1 u% u0 \7 L3 X8 OMs. Leu, 36 years old, has been working since 2003 to show big companies that this pool of immigrants is ready, willing -- and here. "We don't have to invest any money in educating these people," she says. "Business wants to bring in new talent. But are we even using the talent we have?" She says -- and the companies confirm -- that so far she has deals to screen, prep and funnel candidates to Google Inc., Bearing Point Inc. and Robert Half International Inc., among others.

Running a cash register was the only talent Ms. Kennedy was using. Before landing in America, her name was Oyumaa Batsuuri. She was born 30 years ago on her parents' farm in northern Mongolia and grew up milking cows. She moved to Ulan Bator in 1993, got her degree, and took an important job at her country's new stock exchange. In 2002, she flew to San Francisco to study English, met a lawyer, married him and stayed.

At the time of her job interview, Ms. Kennedy was working at the Seabreeze Deli & Market (famous for crab) in Berkeley for $8.50 an hour. She had applied for many accounting jobs. A degree from Ulan Bator -- "Where?" -- and experience at the Mongolian Stock Exchange -- "What?" -- got her exactly nowhere. Nor did offering her coping strategy for workplace stress. She couldn't escape the deli. Then she discovered Ms. Leu's agency, which got her out from behind the counter and into a cubicle at Wells Fargo & Co.

8 o" H6 J- b  W) y: PToday's immigration debate is about more than unskilled workers. U.S. companies also say they need more workers with skills. The U.S. issues 140,000 green cards to company staffers, but a "comprehensive" bill in the Senate would add an extra 175,000 every year for the next decade. Yet there are some 800,000 others who come to stay legally but not specifically for employment in most years who might be able to fill such jobs.

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Where do they fit in? Government has few answers. "We have a much more developed immigration policy than an integration policy," says Michael Fix of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

Ms. Leu didn't need a survey to know that. Touring a New York chicken factory as a resettlement worker in the mid-1990s, she met two refugees plucked from the cutting line to be supervisors. One was an engineer from Iraq, the other a surgeon from Bosnia. "The owner was so proud," she recalls. "I'm saying to myself, 'This is not a success.' "

) j3 u7 m+ \7 m  Q) l0 B1 dNeither bias nor English fluency are the main issues, as she sees it. Immigrants who would otherwise qualify -- and arrive confident of picking up their careers where they left off -- have their hopes dashed by a failure to connect on other levels: "The American process of promoting yourself is so foreign," Ms. Leu says. American employers often find foreign diplomas baffling, too, and don't know how to compare them to U.S. equivalents. States rarely give credence to foreign licenses, often requiring immigrants to get local certification that may mean additional courses.

9 f, x! l( K4 `  i  hMostly, though, employers don't know this labor reserve exists. In 2003, Ms. Leu opened an office and began offering big companies a stream of candidates. Few went for it. That explains why her agency is a nonprofit. "We have the supply," she says. "Not the demand."
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- n; j; y4 z$ A: k# V; d. m; VHer supply filters in via local immigrant networks: a Kenyan public-relations man, a plant pathologist from Bulgaria, an Eritrean chemist, a guidance counselor from Cameroon.
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Dzmitry Pinski, 31, has a philosophy doctorate from Belarus. He taught ethics there before winning the State Department's visa lottery. He landed in Los Angeles in 2003, worked in a bakery and a Russian bookstore, then found Ms. Leu. He wants to be a corporate ethics officer.
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8 C  e8 f1 l: F* B% p6 J8 UHélio Prado, 39, was a $90,000-a-year stockbroker in Brazil. Now he is a waiter at Fuzio's, a restaurant in San Francisco, granted U.S. asylum after a gay-bashing incident in Sao Paulo. In six years, his best jobs here have been two internships, both unpaid. He came across Ms. Leu online in March and sent her his résumé for a total rewrite. "In Brazil, I could always be honest and show the best of me," he says. "Here, I just don't know what's expected. I'm stuck."

: p0 L" F( u* u" d: C1 v7 C" PSo far, Ms. Leu says she has unstuck 200 of her 350 clients. Her biggest success has come with 156,000-employee Wells Fargo. Joycee Wong, a part-timer in the bank's museum who came to the U.S. from Hong Kong at age 10, stopped by Ms. Leu's booth at a conference and volunteered to help with mock interviews. She brought along a colleague, Michelle Scales, who is from Pakistan and has since become the bank's head of marketing to immigrant customers.
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0 I5 F0 H9 C* g$ W: @  W2 ZMs. Scales got Ms. Leu in to see Avid Modjtabai, from Iran, who last year was made Wells Fargo's human resources chief. "Jane has a source of immigrant talent," she says. "It's difficult to find these people. It's been a random process." Now the bank has Upwardly Global to search them out and teach them the ways of the American job interview.
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Which is how Oyumaa Kennedy learned that "take a nap" isn't an appropriate answer to a question about stress. The next interview went better. "She showed energy, positive energy," says Anil Mohon, who immigrated from Fiji in 1969. A year ago, he interviewed Ms. Kennedy for a job in Wells Fargo's mutual-fund accounting group. "Eager, eager to learn," he says. "That's her attitude, and that's what we're looking for."