Devon Williams
Professor Amos
JRN 449: International News
11 October 2026
The Translation of International Talent in the American Job Market
In 2016, Syrian data analyst Almothana Alhamoud told NPR reporter Deborah Amos that one of the most difficult parts of transitioning into the American workforce was learning how to market one’s skills and past international work experience.
“To learn to sell yourself, that’s the hard part, it’s the work culture thing here,” Alhamoud told Amos.
Alhamoud came to America with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and experience as a data analyst for Syria’s Agriculture Ministry. His first American job was as a nightshift cashier, until Upwardly Global, a nonprofit that helps work-authorized immigrants and refugees reenter professional careers in the U.S., became his pathway to a more fitting job in IT.
Now ten years later, the cultural problem Amos documented has broadened. Audra Brown, National Director of Employment Services at Upwardly Global, said the organization still helps job seekers “translate their experience into the U.S. job market,” while also “working with employers to make sure they understand how to evaluate immigrant talent.”
The Migration Policy Institute reports that about 20 percent, roughly 2.1 million, of college-educated immigrants were unemployed or working low-skilled jobs in 2022, as opposed to 16 percent of U.S.-born college graduates. Similarly, foreign-born workers composed 19.1 percent of the U.S. labor force in 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but still were less likely than American-born workers to hold managerial or professional positions.
Upwardly Global describes this difficulty in details as small as how an applicant describes past accomplishments.
“Many of our job seekers come from collectivist cultures, where when you’re going for a job, you’re talking more about ‘what my team did and what my duties were,’” said Brown. American hiring culture, she described, expects achievements to be described individualistically: “‘I did this. I made this impact.’”
Even “becoming comfortable speaking about their own work and self-advocacy is a cultural nuance that they need to practice,” Brown said.
Networking also is a challenge for participants who come from professional backgrounds where a credential leads directly to a career, said Brown, without the necessary secondary connection of marketing oneself to others. International CVs, in contrast to American resumes, can include photographs and several pages of information that would be unusual on a standard American resume, and this format discrepancy is vital with the rise of AI hiring practices.
Fiona Maazel, Upwardly Global’s interim Vice President of Marketing and Communications, said recruiters are facing an application pool inundated with AI-generated material.
“AI has opened the floodgates, and now you’re getting a bajillion resumes that AI has produced,” Maazel said. “You might be screening out really valuable talent, but also you’re overwhelmed.” These AI systems working to select candidates for interviews can filter out international talent when their applications do not fit the American models they are trained on.
“ATS and AI screening tools might automatically discount someone because their background doesn’t… fit the U.S. experience,” Brown said. Employers may overlook a foreign degree, an unfamiliar company name or a career uncommon in American applications.
That has given Upwardly Global the task of certifying that these candidates are still worth consideration when their applications can be less familiar.
“These are highly trained professionals who have been vetted by us,” Maazel said. “We can vouch for them. These are real people.”
Brown stated that Upwardly Global is employing AI on their end as well by building AI-enabled resume and interview practice tools because existing products are “not necessarily tested or built with an immigrant professional in mind.” It also reorganized its resume guidance around the skills that automated screening systems search for and avoid that which it is trained to reject.
Brown says these employment disparities and barriers still vary widely according to profession, English ability, immigration history, and extent of displacement. About 40 percent of Upwardly Global’s participants, she said, are refugees or asylees, some of whom arrive after years outside their professions or without documents needed to verify their past professional credentials.
Migration Policy Institute research in 2019 has identified English proficiency, race, and legal status as influential predictors of whether college-educated immigrants work below their skill level. In one analysis, 55 percent of immigrants with very limited English were underemployed, compared with 15 percent of those who were fully proficient.
Federal immigration policy is similarly making employment status more unstable for many workers. President Donald Trump suspended most refugee admissions in January 2025, and the United States only admitted 16,292 refugees in fiscal year 2026, compared to the more than 100,000 admitted in fiscal 2024. Beginning October 30, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security ended automatic extensions of employment authorization documents (EADs) in certain categories, with limited exceptions.
Mary Lee, Upwardly Global’s director of employer engagement, said it is a “common misperception” that immigrants, refugees, and asylees necessarily require employers to sponsor visas. Upwardly Global now advises eligible job seekers to write “fully work-authorized” at the top of their resumes to preempt that incorrect assumption.
The organization is also seeing participants face interruptions in work authorization due to new renewal requirements. “Sometimes it creates a gap,” Brown said.
Now that there are fewer pathways for migrants to enter the U.S., “we’re starting to see our demographic shifting to people who’ve been here longer, who have been out of the professional workforce longer,” she continued.
For Maazel, reduced immigration makes it “even more pressing, I think, and more valuable,” to aid skilled immigrants already in the country in their search for employment.
While ‘selling oneself’ is still a necessary missing skill taught at Upwardly Global, the organization now faces the more complex problems of AI screening, credential recognition, and changing work-authorization rules. The onus now falls to employers to learn how to ‘translate’ international experience and backgrounds into a U.S. lens and to train automatic hiring systems to do the same.
