Frederick Rwaykaka walked into the barely lit basement of the Rhino Lounge in Waltham to prepare for his night shift as manager of the restaurant and club.
He did a quick once-over to make sure everything was in order, testing out audio and visual equipment before turning his attention to the bar.
He does the work efficiently, but it isn’t what he has been trained to do. Nor is it what he had planned to do once he arrived in America in 2022.
Rwaykaka received both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business administration from Makerere University, the largest institution in Uganda. But while he wanted to continue down that business career path, the Ugandan-owned Rhino Lounge was the first steady job in the U.S. he could find.
“Moving and reestablishing in the United States is not an easy thing. Most especially for immigrants,” he said. “I couldn’t get a job that required a master’s here. So I got an opportunity to start work here in the restaurant.”
He is one of 240,000 people living in Massachusetts who acquired at least a bachelor’s degree in another country, according to an October 2023 report from Massachusetts Business Roundtable and the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University. These immigrants face barriers in entering the workforce because U.S. employers don’t recognize their credentials.
Of the state’s foreign-educated residents, the 106,000 who earned just a bachelor’s degree face the most disadvantages in the labor market. These individuals not only earn 20% less than American-educated skilled workers, they are also more likely to be unemployed or underemployed, the study found.
If those 106,000 residents with foreign bachelor’s degrees earned wages at the same rate as U.S.-trained residents with identical degrees, they would be earning about $2.3 billion more annually, the report found.
Rwaykaka left Uganda and his job working at Makerere University after his mother lost in an election. He said the election was fraudulent, and came to America to escape potential backlash from speaking out against the government.
His first thought when arriving in America, and the first thought of many immigrants, he said, was to make money.
Through a WhatsApp group chat of Ugandans in the Greater Boston area, he got set up at the Rhino Lounge. He also briefly spent time working at a factory as an operator.
“It wasn’t easy because I had to first get into a number of things,” he said. “Get into the restaurant, get into cooking, get into the bar, learn the types of liquors.”
The factory was similarly challenging, he said. “You don’t have any experience in the factory. You are [at] different levels of understanding and processing things. You are there to get money, but you don’t fit in the system. You feel lost. That’s what I was going through then.”
JD Chesloff, CEO of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable, said skilled workers are the biggest component in maintaining the state’s competitive advantage.
“And we have this really wonderful pool of untapped talent here,” he told GBH News. “I think it’s essential for our current and future economy to figure out how to get immigrants connected to work opportunities. Both for the benefits of them and the state’s economy.”
Kemberlie Adolphe came to the U.S. in 2021 from Haiti. She studied medicine at the Université Notre Dame d’Haïti. After seven years of study — with only her thesis presentation left to receive her diploma — she fled the country because of the increased violence.
Adolphe came to live with family in Massachusetts. Her arrival presented personal and professional hurdles, including struggling to pass the STAMP test, which tests the language proficiency of health care professionals.
“In the beginning, I was lost,” Adolphe said. “It’s a whole new culture, it’s a whole new language that I had to learn and that I had to study in. It was challenging. It was overwhelming.”
Organizations like the African Bridge Network have stepped up to help individuals like Rwaykaka and Adolphe find work at their education level.
Rwaykaka heard about ABN through the same WhatsApp group he learned about the Rhino Lounge.
He didn’t want to return to school for another three years to get a U.S. degree for what he had already spent seven years studying. He also didn’t want to study business again.
The ABN program helped him complete a research administration course at Emmanuel College and land a temporary position with Boston Medical Center handling research cost analysis.
He’s hopeful that with the ABN and the experience with Boston Medical Center, more meaningful work will open up to him.
For Adolphe, navigating the emotional and professional challenges involved with relocating has been a whirlwind. But having completed a certification in management and health from the University of Washington and landing a clinical research role with Boston Medical Center through ABN, she feels that she’s one step closer to regaining her life.
“For someone coming [to] a place who doesn’t know anything about the place, ABN is like water in the desert,” she said. “It was like I started to breathe again. That’s what I felt when I started the fellowship with ABN.”
To date, ABN has supported more than 350 foreign-educated immigrants with fellowships, career advice and orientation programs. Through its fellowship program, ABN connects foreign-educated immigrants with jobs at local employers to get on the same path they were on in their home nations.
“We are constantly engaging employers to do the work, educating them about this population and then working out a pathway to bring them into that workplace,” said Emmanuel Owusu, the organization’s executive director.
In November, ABN received a $15,000 grant from the New York Life Insurance Company to support its career development services, educational resources and daily operations.
Owusu said that the grant will help support the organization’s three-level approach to programming: access to information, candidate preparation and candidate placement.
“It’s very important that we provide them the adequate and the accurate information to allow them to begin to figure out, ‘how do I build a career in Massachusetts,’” Owusu added.
The work ABN does also helps immigrants deal with the psychological effects of relocation and looking for work is also a priority of ABN, Owusu says. For someone who was able to work in the field they spent years studying and be unable to support themselves or their families the same in a new country, takes an incredible toll.
“They cannot earn enough money to support their own family. And what we’re talking about [has] generational impact,” Owusu said. “If they are not able to build the right careers, it will affect the generation that is coming after them. That’s what we’re dealing with.”
