Immigrant Professionals in L.A. Area Hunt Dignity, Jobs

Luis Ruiz used to teach economics and mathematics to university students. Then he came to America. Now, he’s a 37-year-old delivery man at a Popeye’s fast food restaurant.

“You feel like you are locked in a room and the door won’t open,” he said.

Unlike the majority of immigrants flocking to Southern California, Ruiz, a native of Nicaragua, is a professional, a college graduate who commanded respect and a title in his own country. But in Los Angeles, his career unraveled and his hard-earned diplomas are as meaningless as candy wrappers. He has yet to learn English. Customers at Popeye’s assume that he has no education. They don’t bother meeting his eyes as they fish in their pockets to tip the man who brought dinner to their door.

In the pastiche of immigration, Ruiz is one of the invisible faces: underemployed professionals, thwarted because they have not been able to transfer their credentials to their new land.

Thousands of immigrants in Ruiz’s position--doctors, lawyers and professors who wielded clout in their countries--tumbled when they came here. They arrived puffed with hope and ambition. Now, months or years later, dreams deferred or deflated, they lead hidden and humbled lives of quiet frustration.

In the sweep of America’s immigration history, such agony is part of a broader, more positive process: Many of those stymied from continuing their chosen professions turn their energies to new, unexpected fields and become successful Americans. The lore of all immigrant groups, from Jewish to Irish to Vietnamese, is steeped with such riches-to-rags-to-riches stories. But history is little comfort at this moment to a man like Ruiz. The past is too close and the future looks too dark.

“I miss what I was going to accomplish,” he said.

An estimated 13 million legal and illegal immigrants are expected to come to America in the 1990s, almost 4 million to California. The proportion of professionals is elusive, but it is clear that they are a distinct minority. For example, only 19% of legal immigrants to California are college graduates, one study said.

For these advantaged people, experts say, life often becomes harder as job opportunities dwindle and anti-immigrant sentiment grows.

Some, such as Juan Jose Parada, come from countries such as Mexico, where economic decline has propelled many professionals to the United States. Others, such as Elizabeth Paulino, from the Dominican Republic, and Gyung Goo, from South Korea, come less out of desperation than the belief that they will flourish here.

These dreams die most often when the immigrants, for all their intelligence, cannot come to grips with English quickly. A savage Catch-22 sets in: They must make money to support their families and cannot devote themselves to learning the language that would help recapture the status left behind.

The thwarted professionals caught in that dilemma often wither under a psychological one-two punch: culture shock and depression, said Dr. Rolando Castillo, a UC Irvine professor of psycho-social medicine and director of a program designed to help foreign doctors get licensed.

“The more they are disengaged from their career, the more they lose interest in returning to it,” he said.

When Elizabeth Paulino, a doctor, first came to the United States, she cried every day for six months and then returned to her middle-class home in the Dominican Republic.

“It is very difficult to face that you are nothing here and in your country, you are a somebody,” said Paulino, 28.

After studying English for several years, she came again to California, determined to enter the field of kidney specialists. But lacking a license to practice medicine here, she had to take a lesser job, as a cashier at a J.C. Penney department store.

Under “education,” she wrote on her application form that she had finished high school.

“It was too embarrassing to say I had graduated medical school,” she said.

A year later, Paulino is still here and unemployed. Recently certified as a physician’s assistant, she spends her days combing the classified ads, applying for work at clinics. At least this would be work in her field, even if it means she is no longer diagnosing or treating patients. At least this likely would pay more than the $5 an hour she got as a cashier and tide her over until she gets her medical license.

Paulino lives with a cousin and her family in a small Lakewood apartment, where she sleeps on the living room couch. When she gets occasional migraine headaches, she retreats to the quiet of a neighbor’s apartment. She has learned to cook, clean and tidy up after her cousin’s two small children.

“I was like the fairy tale princess--only in reverse,” she says in Spanish. “I never had to worry about housework.”

Once she obtains a physician’s assistant job, she’ll confront her major hurdle: the license exam, a test of her English as well as her medical knowledge.

Her struggles here, she tells herself, will improve the way she treats her patients.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget to be compassionate, because now I’m the one who’s a nobody,” Paulino said. “I’ve learned to live in both worlds.”

Unexpected Direction

Juan Jose Parada has also learned to live in both worlds. He had no choice.

Parada, 41, used to be a surgeon. But he has not practiced medicine full time since he left Mexico 10 years ago. Several times a year he returns and performs surgeries. This helps him feel he has not forsaken his talents. It helps him stand patiently behind the counter of the downtown Los Angeles shop where he works as a jeweler.

Parada decided he wanted to be a doctor when he was 9 years old in the Mexican state of Nayarit. His uncle was a physician. Even as a youngster, Parada could see how neighbors treated his uncle with respect, the kind of subdued awe that they had for the priest.

To help pay for school in Guadalajara, he began illegally crossing the border in summers and heading to farms outside of Fresno, where he picked grapes. By age 28, he was a doctor.

But as the economy in Mexico plunged, Parada gradually realized that he could not support a family on his salary as a surgeon, the equivalent of $330 a month. Even taxi drivers made more money.

So he and his pregnant wife came to Los Angeles, where he envisioned setting up a lucrative practice.

His decision was common, experts say.

“In the decade of the 1980s, which was a decade of [economic] crisis, almost four times as many people graduated universities in Mexico than there are jobs created for professionals,” said David Lorey, the author of two books about Mexican professionals. “This means people with university degrees don’t work as professionals; they have to modify their aspirations. . . . So there is a flow northward.”

Parada started here by selling jewelry at swap meets and eventually as a clerk in a jewelry store. Then--first naively, then quixotically--he began visiting hospitals and chatting with doctors, certain someone would give him a break and allow him to practice, even though he had no license.

It didn’t happen and he, like others, learned the hard lesson: “When you cross the border into the U.S., your knowledge doesn’t apply here,” Parada said.

He comforted himself with the thought that he would return to Mexico and resume his practice as soon as the economy rebounded. That didn’t happen either, and depression descended. He would wake up at 3 in the morning, tormented with the thought that he was wasting his life.

Sure, he had a nice house in Orange County, but he shelled out $1,500 in monthly house payments. He made good money as a jeweler, $45,000 a year, but he had no passion for the work. It contented him that his 7-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter were comfortable here, but he felt so empty.

“Why am I not practicing medicine?” Parada kept asking himself. “I felt like I was dying.”

He became certified as a physician’s assistant. However, he quickly realized that was a mistake. For one thing, he made more money as a jeweler. For another, taking a patient’s blood pressure and temperature was mechanical, unsatisfying.

When war broke out in the Persian Gulf, Parada tried to enlist in the military as a medic. Too old, he was told.

“It’s like the world closes in on you,” he said.

There was only one way out. He began studying for his U.S. medical license. These days he sometimes wakes up and studies from 4 to 6 a.m. When the jewelry shop is quiet, he pulls out his textbooks. When his children go to bed, out come the books.

Recently, a teacher at his children’s school asked him to talk to students on career day. Parada offered to either explain what he does here as a jeweler or what he did in Mexico as a doctor. Talk about medicine, the teacher said. So Parada brought his stethoscope to school and described healing patients. His son and daughter sat beaming in the front row.

Parada, who became a citizen in February, will take the medical license test next month. He assumes he will fail on the first try but eventually succeed, however many tries it takes.

“Even if I’m an old man, I’m going to do it,” he said. “ “Never give up a dream.”

Regrets Add Up

To some degree, Gyung Goo has given up.

For 20 years, Goo was a pastor in South Korea, a member of his city’s governing board. For the past 20 months, the middle-aged man has worked as a janitor in Los Angeles, where his plight has gone from bad to worse.

Goo, 55, came here three years ago as a tourist and stayed, a common immigration violation. His wife supported him by sending money, and after he gained his permanent resident status, he sent for her and their children.

He took his first job as a janitor in 1995, paying $3,125 in “goodwill money” to take over a cleaning contract. He, his wife, their 17-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter cleaned a 2-story, 100-desk office building five evenings a week, earning $1,125 a month.

Soon, Goo recognized the deal had gone bad. He and his family were not always paid. Claiming he was owed more than $4,000, he quit earlier this month. Now he works as a night clerk at a hotel, a job that pays $6 an hour. He’s looking for a second job.

The gray-haired Goo, who once made religious films for his church, laughs sadly when asked if this is what he imagined life would be like in America.

“I thought I’d be able to utilize my expertise and skills,” he said through a translator.

He has created his own church without walls, serving as a pastor to three Korean families. He expects to go no further. Like so many generations of immigrants, he will have to be satisfied with the success of his children. America will have to reward them with all the opportunities that it has denied him.

“For myself and my wife, I feel it was a mistake that we immigrated here,” he said.

A Life Left Behind

Teacher-turned-deliveryman Luis Ruiz is not yet prepared to say he made a mistake by coming here. The mistake, he has come to believe, may have been challenging his own country.

After teaching classes in which he criticized Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, Ruiz was jailed twice, once for eight months and the next time for three months. Released from prison, he began receiving death threats, he said. So five years ago, he moved to the United States, where he first worked in a clothing factory.

“I thought with my knowledge, my background, I’d learn a little English, it’d be easy for me to move around and get a better job,” he said.

But with his wife and two sons to support, Ruiz has worked one menial job after another. Once a voracious reader, he now reads only the Bible. Though he never before believed in God, he has become religious. It eases his hopelessness to think that God is testing him and that a better world awaits.

He prefers not to think of what he once had in Nicaragua: a two-bedroom house built for his family on an acre of land loaded with trees bearing lemons, mangoes, oranges and bananas. Such memories only make his one-bedroom $400-a-month apartment with hand-me-down furniture on Normandie Avenue west of downtown Los Angeles seem even more squalid and cramped.

He has not told his colleagues at Popeye’s that he once taught the history of economics or introductory mathematics at a university. It seems best to leave that other life unmentioned, lest co-workers suspect him of putting on airs.

He has no job security. Earning $5 an hour, he has been unable to save money for emergencies. When his son is sick, he cannot ask a doctor friend to tend him, as he could in Nicaragua; he must wait in line at a public clinic or hospital. Most painful of all, he cannot help his older son with homework because it is in English.

He misses family members and friends and the future that he thought he would have.

“Ever since I was growing up, I made up my mind I wanted to study a lot and be somebody,” said Ruiz. “Of all that, I have nothing.”