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This reporting was completed with support from the Nova Media Fellowship and Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Despite completing a rigorous training program at Walgreens spanning 70 hours of in-person and online work, Reem Alzaeem sits at home in Chicago, unable to obtain employment as a pharmacy technician because her H-4 visa doesn’t allow her to work.

“I have the degree, but I can’t work in any pharmacy without the work permit,” Alzaeem explained. As a 41-year-old Palestinian mother of two, Alzaeem’s standing in the U.S. became even more precarious after her husband’s layoff last November left their family in legal and financial limbo. 

Alzaeem and her family first came to the U.S. in 2019 when her husband, Yousef, was accepted into Harvard University to pursue his master’s degree in business. After he graduated and worked in Indiana for two years, the family returned to Gaza. In August 2023, they moved back to the U.S. when Yousef received a job offer to work as a director at a construction company in Chicago. Two months later, the genocide in Gaza began. 

While the couple’s extended family remains in Gaza, their home was destroyed, leaving them with nothing to return to. The family’s situation worsened further when Yousef lost his job while working on an H-1B visa reserved for immigrants in specialty occupations or performing services of “exceptional merit and ability.” These are the same visas for which the Trump administration recently imposed a new $100,000 hiring fee for companies looking to obtain highly skilled workers from other countries.

Alzaeem’s employment situation represents a growing but often overlooked population: immigrant mothers who arrive in the U.S. with professional credentials and work experience, only to find their achievements constrained by immigration policies beyond their control.

Unlike the young undocumented students or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients who typically dominate discussions about immigrant access to higher education, women like Alzaeem came to the U.S. as established professionals: nurses, engineers, teachers, lawyers. However, their foreign degrees and expertise go unrecognized or underutilized in American institutions and workplaces. Alzaeem has a computer engineering degree from Gaza, but like many other immigrant mothers before her, she’s forced to start over and pursue an entirely new career path—not because she lacks education and experience, but because the system fails to value the credentials she already holds.

Alzaeem’s experience reflects a crisis in American higher education, in which immigrant and refugee mothers face layered barriers that often prove insurmountable, despite bringing what researchers call “cultural wealth” to institutions that too often fail to recognize their value.

“The poverty cycle”  

Recent research by Elika Dadsetan, whose doctorate in education focused on newly arrived skilled immigrants in Massachusetts higher education, identified three critical patterns affecting this population of immigrant women. Transitions to the U.S. are “marked by financial strain, credential non-recognition, and immigration hurdles,” she said in an email, while transitions into higher education reveal “institutional inflexibility, such as rigid course structures, limited advising, and few tailored supports.” Dadsetan, who is the executive director of VISIONS, an organization dedicated to empowerment and community building, found that for mothers, these barriers are compounded. 

“While all participants navigated exclusion, mothers carried additional layers of responsibility,” Dadsetan said her research found. “Balancing caregiving with study meant that rigid class schedules and lack of childcare amplified their barriers.”

The discrimination often begins at college registration. When Alzaeem first approached Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois about computer engineering courses related to her Gaza bachelor’s degree, she said the response she received was chilly. 

“She wasn’t friendly, to be honest,” Alzaeem said of an employee at the community college’s registration office. “She said that as you don’t have a Social Security number and have a green card, so you have to go as an international student. And to be an international student, that means that it will cost me more.” 

At Moraine Valley, international students pay $396 per credit hour, almost triple the $140 per credit hour in-district rate. Without a Social Security number, Alzaeem also couldn’t access federal student aid or most scholarships. With her husband sending money to family members in Gaza each month, the international student fees were simply unaffordable. The computer engineering pathway she’d hoped to pursue, building on her degree from Gaza, was effectively closed to her.

Instead, Alzaeem enrolled in free classes for people who speak English as a Second Language, along with other no-cost courses such as critical thinking and data entry, as a way to spend her time productively while her daughters attended school. It would be months before she discovered the pharmacy technician scholarship program that finally allowed her to pursue professional training.

For many immigrants, college registration is an ordeal. Alzaeem spent roughly five to six weeks navigating bureaucracy, in order to eventually enroll at Moraine Valley. “It wasn’t easy because I did not have a Social Security number,” Alzaeem said. 

According to Itedal Shalabi, the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit social service agency Arab American Family Services, another barrier for immigrants enrolling in classes is that they can’t obtain their transcripts from their home countries due to ongoing war and conflict, destroyed or non-functioning educational institutions, and lack of knowledge about how to navigate international transcript requests from countries with unstable governments. For Afghan women Shalabi worked with after the Taliban takeover, and for Palestinians like Alzaeem, whose universities have been destroyed by Israeli bombardment, obtaining official academic records becomes nearly impossible.

Shalabi, who is also an adjunct professor teaching social work policy at Illinois’ Dominican University, regularly encounters these registration barriers and credential recognition challenges. She works with “tons and tons” of credentialed immigrant mothers who were nurses, teachers, accountants, and even doctors in their home countries. However, once in the U.S., they face tremendous obstacles. Besides the issues with transcripts, confusing application processes, and being categorized as expensive international students while residing in the U.S., many also don’t know how to get their foreign degrees evaluated or translated into credentials that American employers will recognize. 

“A lot of them didn’t know how to navigate that process, and a lot of it was intimidating,” Shalabi explained.

Marina Evseeva, 31, who is studying to be a lawyer, discovered similar financial exclusion when she arrived in New Hampshire as a Russian asylum-seeker in 2012. While many employers rejected her job applications, assuming she wasn’t proficient in English, her biggest obstacle to pursuing higher education was systemic financial barriers.

“I was not eligible for financial aid because of my status,” Evseeva told Prism in an email. “Eight years later, we still didn’t get an appointment for the initial interview to get our [asylum] case heard.”

These barriers have long plagued immigrants in American higher education. Undocumented students cannot access federal financial aid, they are charged prohibitive “international student” rates, and in some states, they are barred from even attending community colleges. These are just some of the reasons it typically takes immigrant students significantly longer to transfer to universities and complete degrees. While women such as Evseeva and Alzaeem have legal status, they face parallel exclusions: yearslong waits for asylum hearings, visa restrictions that prohibit employment, and financial aid systems designed around citizenship.

The financial barriers extend beyond tuition into a web of bureaucratic obstacles and expensive redundancies. Lydiah Owiti-Otienoh, originally from Kenya, with a military spouse based in Connecticut, repeatedly spent as much as $300 on credential evaluations. These formal assessments by organizations such as World Education Services translate foreign degrees into U.S. equivalents for employers and universities. Despite holding law and master’s degrees from English-speaking institutions and having work experience with the United Nations Environment Programme and UNICEF, Owiti-Otienoh paid for the same evaluations multiple times, often receiving no response from employers or being asked to repeat the process by different universities.

“How many times can I be asked the same thing?” she said. “Once it’s enough.”

The system’s inefficiencies lead to more exploitation. According to Owiti-Otienoh, universities often direct immigrant students to paid English programs, rather than informing them about lower-cost or free alternatives often available through organizations that serve immigrant communities.  “As a student adviser, you should have these resources in hand to give to students,” she said.

But this form of financial exploitation also extends beyond redundancy. “There are agencies that take advantage of them and say, ‘No, you need to enroll in this, and you need to enroll in that.’ They’re getting certificates that don’t take them anywhere, but they think it’s better than nothing,” Shalabi said.

According to Evseeva, the conditions facing immigrant women seeking higher education effectively lead to a trap. “Many people cannot break the poverty cycle without education. And to get education, you need to have financial support,” she said. 

Rarely recognized assets

While barriers to higher education have long existed for immigrant students, the Trump administration’s wide-ranging attacks on immigrant communities impact students, scholars, educators, and practitioners in higher education, as well as the communities they come from, according to the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration. 

This is why the alliance of American college and university leaders partnered with the National Latinx Psychological Association, the Lab for Immigrant Rights and Mental Health at Rutgers University, and La Esperanza Research Collaborative at Virginia Commonwealth University for a new practical support guide aimed at helping to protect the mental health of immigrants in the college community during the current, uncertain climate created by the Trump administration. 

The rise of xenophobia and racism is one of the biggest challenges impacting the mental health of immigrants, according to Germán Cadenas, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Rutgers. Cadenas’ research shows that there’s a great risk of anxiety and depression for immigrants experiencing high levels of everyday discrimination, and that mental health distress is far greater for college students who have precarious immigration statuses.

The psychological toll can almost feel as if it compounds the practical barriers, Shalabi noted. The executive director said it’s very frustrating for immigrant women to experience insurmountable hurdles in the U.S. due to their immigration status, and it has a profound impact on their mental health. 

The need to start over pervades immigrant mothers’ educational experiences in the U.S., regardless of their prior credentials. Alzaeem obtained a computer engineering degree from Gaza in 2007, but feels compelled to pursue new training and education because of the time gap and rapid technological changes. “I feel like I have to study again. … There’s a huge gap as a computer engineer,” she said, while also acknowledging her solid educational foundation.

While immigrant women may feel a deficit in their skills and education, Dadsetan’s research illustrates how much immigrant mothers bring to the table: networks of mutual aid, multilingual skills, deep commitment to their family’s futures, and strategies for navigating uncertainty, chief among them. Yet institutions “rarely recognized these as assets,” Dadsetan wrote.

Recruiters told Owiti-Otienoh that her comprehensive legal education from Kenya—where she studied “the whole spectrum of what law is”—didn’t qualify her for even legal clerk positions, a reality reinforced by her research into U.S. legal licensing requirements.

When traditional institutions fail, innovative alternatives demonstrate what’s possible. Evseeva found success through the University of the People (UoPeople), a tuition-free online institution that provides flexibility that she said traditional schools couldn’t match.

“Unlike any other school, it was convenient, flexible, and tuition-free. I could continue working and studying at my own pace and time,” Evseeva said. According to reporting from the New York Times, UoPeople has 117,000 students from 200 countries, 10% of whom are refugees. Of those taking classes in the U.S., the university says 30% are Black students, 60% are first-generation college students, and 50% are parents. The university, which is accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission, worked for Evseeva. In 2023, she was accepted to 10 law schools, nine with scholarships and five with full funding.

For Alzaeem, things eventually began to fall in place at Moraine Valley—sort of. Initially relegated to only no-cost courses and basic skills classes, she was eventually able to secure a pharmacy technician scholarship, though she currently can’t work in the field. Broadly, community colleges offer more promise than traditional universities, providing accessible support services and more inclusive environments. However, many immigrant mothers, such as Alzaeem, still face the foundational barrier of work authorization.

Work authorization, also known as an Employment Authorization Document, is the legal permission immigrants need to work in the U.S. Asylum-seekers, refugees, and certain visa holders can apply for work authorization, which typically must be renewed every one to two years. However, H-4 visa holders—spouses of H-1B workers such as Alzaeem—are generally barred from working unless their spouse’s H-1B has been approved. While H-4 visa holders can study and earn degrees, they cannot legally use those credentials to work. The visa ties their legal status entirely to their spouse’s employment, creating a dependency that leaves families vulnerable when layoffs occur.

Alzaeem’s family’s precarious status, now dependent on her husband finding a new H-1B sponsorship, exemplifies how immigration policy undermines educational investment. 

The Trump administration’s immigration policies have created widespread uncertainty on college campuses: increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity near schools, threats to revoke visas for students participating in protests, and restrictions on work authorization have all contributed to a climate of fear that discourages immigrant students from pursuing or completing their education. The administration’s new exorbitant hiring fee for H-1B workers makes it even less likely that employers will sponsor visa holders. Policy experts also warn that the Trump administration’s new policy will undermine U.S. competitiveness by driving skilled workers and their families to other countries. For women like Alzaeem, whose legal status depends entirely on their spouse’s employment, a single layoff can unravel years of educational progress and leave hard-earned credentials unusable.

With immigration application fees rising and enforcement priorities shifting, many immigrant women are abandoning educational aspirations entirely to focus on immediate economic survival and legal stability. Shalabi said that many women in her network “are more worried about getting their citizenship and making sure that they’re documented, more than they’re even worried about getting a job.”

It’s a system that now wants and does not want highly educated people.

Itedal Shalabi, Arab American Family Services co-founder and executive director

While colleges can do nothing to shift federal immigration laws and policies, Dadsetan told Prism that to even begin chipping away at the barriers experienced by immigrant women students, colleges must commit to “equity as practice, not just policy.”

Concrete solutions include evening and online classes, extended timelines, peer mentoring programs, multilingual advising, and faculty training to recognize cultural strengths rather than deficits. Most critically, institutions must address the fundamental disconnect between diversity goals and exclusionary practices, while advocating for immigration policies that allow educated immigrants to contribute their skills.

The barriers facing immigrant mothers in higher education reflect broader questions about American educational equity and economic mobility. These women arrive with professional experience, multilingual abilities, and deep motivation to succeed—assets any institution should value.

Yet the Trump administration has systematically dismantled support systems for immigrant students, eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that provide multilingual advising and culturally responsive programs, while simultaneously restricting immigration pathways. The result is a contradictory system: Universities recruit talent while federal policy ensures that talent cannot contribute.

Shalabi has a wide-ranging perspective on the educational barriers faced by immigrant women, given her dual jobs teaching social work students and running a community service organization. She told Prism that she finds it deeply worrying that U.S. employers continue to demand degrees, while the Trump administration is actively making higher education more unattainable for citizens and noncitizens alike. “It’s a system that now wants and does not want highly educated people,” she said.

Evseeva’s advice to other immigrant mothers captures both the challenge and the potential of higher education. “Try! Go for it even when it looks like you can’t,” she said. “You’ll make your own path if you walk.”

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor