Untapped Talent: The Costs of Brain Waste among Highly Skilled Immigrants in the United States
The United States has long attracted some of the world’s best and brightest. But nearly 2 million immigrants with college degrees are relegated to low-skilled jobs or can’t find work. The result of this brain waste? If these highly skilled immigrants were working at their skill level, in the professions for which they had trained for and have experience in, they would earn more than $39 billion more annually and pay more than $10 billion more in taxes. In fact, one in four of the 7.6 million college-educated immigrants in the United States during the 2009-2013 period experienced skill underutilization, meaning that they were either working in low-skilled jobs or unemployed. Untapped Talent: The Costs of Brain Waste among Highly Skilled Immigrants in the United States offers the first-ever economic costs of underemployment for the college-educated immigrant population in the United States. Drawing upon analysis of Census Bureau data, the report profiles the underutilized population and quantifies the cost of brain waste nationally and in several states.
Batalova, J., Fix, M., & Bachmeier, J. D. (2016). Untapped Talent: The Costs of Brain Waste among Highly Skilled Immigrants in the United States. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute. Retrieved from http://research.newamericaneconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/BrainWaste-Full-Report-FINAL.pdf