Text: Sarah Damian
Video: Esther Gentile New America Media Posted: May 29, 2010

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To watch the accompanying video, please follow this link: http://vimeo.com/11914128

Working as an orthopedic surgeon in one country and as a cashier at a hot dog stand in another sounds ridiculous, but that’s the story of Marwan, one of 1.3 million underemployed newcomers in the United States.

As executive director of San Francisco-based Upwardly Global, Nikki Cicerani works to reverse that trend and help highly-skilled immigrants like Marwan rebuild their professional careers and reach their full potential.

Upwardly Global is one of four awardees of the Migration Policy Institute’s second annual E Pluribus Unum Prizes that acknowledge outstanding immigrant integration initiatives around the country. They were selected from 340 applicants.

MPI President Demetrios Papademetriou declared the recognition of the awardees’ efforts as one of “hope for all of those that fear we have lost our way, that after 500 years the American immigration machine has stalled.”

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics, there are 4.1 million legal immigrants who have come to the United States in the last 10 years, with 463,000 new arrivals in the 2009 fiscal year. Over half of the new immigrants in 2009 were married with an average age of 31 years.

Full story here.

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