Immigrant Academics and Cultural Challenges in a Global Environme ...

In a study that compared native-born blacks in the United States to immigrant blacks, Butcher (1994, pp. 275–277), citing supporting works of others, noted that “immigrants have a lower return to education than natives.” Immigrants, even when highly qualified at home, may find that they have to start their career from a lower level relative to the native-born individuals with similar or even lower qualifications. Thus, higher ranks and administrative positions are often automatically ruled out for immigrants when they first arrive. This may be discriminatory but understandable, it seems, given the fact that immigrants are coming in without the requisite intimate cultural experience of the workplace and of the country in which they have chosen to live. Other reasons for this discrimination may relate to the problem of how to assess the quality of immigrants’ educational qualifications and achievements (Grant & Nadin, 2005) and the realization that, in fact, the quality of education in many immigrant countries is actually different (usually lower) than it is in the United States and in western or northern Europe. Immigrants who face discrimination even when they accept that it could be partly explained by factors relating to the quality of their qualifications are not thereby relieved of the stress caused by the experience and of the anxieties involved in trying to overcome or mitigate discrimination.

Classroom Challenges

In contexts where race is highlighted as it is in the United States, quite apart from the issue of teaching effectiveness, the peculiar situation of minority teachers of other races makes these teachers stand out as easy victims of psychosocial insecurity and self-identity crisis. As Berhanu (2006), an Ethiopian-born professor in Sweden, observed, the immigrant minority “Other” has to deal with how to be “accepted and respected as any other ‘regular’ teacher” (p. 281). Further reflecting on the stress of his experience as a minority professor—an Other—he observed the following: