One upon a time, a Russian gentleman came to my house to repair my clothes washer and dryer. He looked it over and in no time found a solution. I remarked that the last guy took forever to figure out what was wrong. He smiled, which made me curious.
One thing led to another, and I discovered the man repairing my clothes washer had been an electrical engineer in Russia. Here he couldn’t meet the compliance standards, so to make a living he went into appliance repair. Although he wasn’t thrilled about it, he accepted his fate.
I met an African gentleman in a medical office who was working as an orderly/assistant. After discussing with him the corruption in his native Ghana, which had forced him to flee to America with his family, he told me he had been a doctor. But here in America he wasn’t accredited and didn’t have the money nor the time to go back to school.
I bring up these incidents because recently I read an article where skilled professionals of every stripe are not working in their trained professions, because they could not meet American standards and accreditation. One guy in the article had been a medical doctor in South America and now here he was with a house plant and pet sitting business.
There have to be hundreds, if not thousands, of these stories. While we hear about the unskilled immigrants, we never seem to hear much about these people. Surely, they find some kind of work and don’t cause a fuss. Some I’m sure eventually become accredited while others never practice their professions again.
One has to wonder about this. We need skilled people. Skilled but unaccredited physicians could very well work in their own communities and other, poorer communities, where on a good day there is a severe shortage of medical care. Perhaps these people could received temporary licensed, or allowed to finish getting accreditation under one plan or another, provided they worked in the communities that need them.
With all the talk about rehabilitating the infrastructure, you would think these people make for viable assets. We have para legas, paramedics, para a lot of things, so why not para something that would allow these people to work within their professions while providing much needed services for others? You would think this is logical.
Of course, we would need to verify degrees and skill sets by running the appropriate background checks. This goes without saying. But there must be some way to bring these immigrants with professional skill sets into our work force. In the forthcoming era of change, maybe it’s time to change this.
Check them out before you hire.
