Hanover
Kriti Gopal, 27, came to the United States nine years ago on an international student visa to pursue a piece of the American dream — while trying to maintain close ties to her family back in India, she earned a college degree in corporate communication at the University of Central Missouri. Things seemed to be going well, and she followed up with a master’s degree in student affairs administration.
Then, ready to bring her nine years of schooling into the workforce, Gopal applied in early 2017 for a competitive internship position at Dartmouth College.
She got it, and that spring she traveled the 1,200 miles to claim a spot among the ranks of the employed. After three months at Dartmouth, she transitioned into a permanent position as the program assistant for the Frank J. Guarini Institute for International Education. The job advertised a starting pay of $17 to $20 an hour.
“Since I moved my life out of Missouri, I’m thinking, ‘This is it, start thinking professionally. School is over. College life is over. I’m going to start a new profession,’ ” Gopal said last week.
Now, a year later, Gopal says she’s excelled at her position. Most days find her dividing her attention between her email, her telephone and the person sitting in the chair in front of her desk, depending on the preferred method of communication for the often-nervous students and families she helps navigate the challenges of traveling overseas to study abroad. Just last week, she said, she got a phone call from a thankful parent whose daughter Gopal had encouraged to be persistent in pushing for a newly created program in Ireland.
But, ironically, Gopal’s position is threatened for a reason that has nothing to do with merit. Soon after being hired, she learned from the College’s Office of Visa and Immigration Services that she doesn’t qualify for an H-1B worker visa. The H-1B program is meant to keep the country’s economy strong by attracting a workforce of college-educated people who specialize in fields ranging from medicine to accounting.
That’s the type of program President Donald Trump likely was referring to in tweets he sent out both Sunday and Monday decrying the lack of border security and saying, in an oft-repeated sentiment, that the nation should “go to Merit based Immigration.”
Gopal said her advanced degree, which prepares graduates for a wide range of entry- and mid-level positions within college administrations, helps her do her job.
“A lot of what I did came from my student affairs degree, because that’s when I learned about student advising and the policies that govern colleges,” Gopal said.
The degree may have helped prepare her for the job at Dartmouth, but the job does not require the degree, and that’s a sticking point, according to George Bruno, a former U.S. ambassador who currently practices immigration law for Mesa Law in Manchester.
“If a person is overqualified, that can lead to denial as well. All of those stars have to be in alignment. … You have to be very careful that the academic credentials and the degree of the candidate match up with the position description so that they are not misaligned,” said Bruno, who is not involved in Gopal’s case.
Gopal, however, said that Dartmouth could have done a better job of anticipating the situation she and others find themselves in — and should have let her know upfront that the school was unlikely to sponsor her job.
Bruno, who did volunteer legal work during the civil rights movement and is a former chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, says that despite the Trump administration’s expressions of support for the H-1B program, he’s seeing a narrowing of options for workers who qualify.
“This administration is not only attacking illegal immigration, it is making it more and more difficult to pursue legal immigration,” he said. “Extreme vetting and denials are the order of the day.”
Last year, he said, about 200,000 employers applied for H-1B visas, but only about 55,000 were authorized by the U.S. Department of Labor. The stricter rules have a chilling effect on employers who would otherwise sponsor the visa applications, Bruno said, because an unsuccessful application costs the employer just as much as a successful one — about $5,000.
The struggle to attract and maintain professional workers can make or break a business, he said.
“I’ve had clients tell me that they can’t get the additional help, that they’re going to have to cut back on their hours or close their business,” Bruno said. “With unemployment in New Hampshire 2.7 percent, it is becoming extremely difficult to find the workers to keep the New Hampshire economy chugging along.”
That kind of pinch can be particularly hard in regions like the Upper Valley, which tend to be the last places that an international worker thinks of when they move to the United States, according to Neal Fenster, president of Enterprise Medical Recruiting, a company that helps match international medical professionals with employers.
“In some of the more rural communities throughout the U.S., it is difficult to recruit physicians,” he said.
Fenster said the visa program guarantees that an international worker will stay with the employer for three to five years, significantly longer than the two-year period that half of new hires spend in a medical position before moving on. The only downside he cited is the cost of the application, a burden that he said can inhibit some companies from tapping into that workforce.
Those types of considerations can come into play for employers like Dartmouth. Diana Lawrence, a spokeswoman for the college, said the administration couldn’t comment on any individual personnel issue, but that in general, the college’s work visa policies are driven by those federal rules.
“Dartmouth provides employment-based visa sponsorship for international faculty, research and staff positions,” Lawrence said. “Those sponsorship decisions are made considering eligibility under federal immigration law and regulations.”
Gopal says having an international workforce is particularly desirable at the Guarini Institute, which hopes to give students the kind of multi-cultural life experience that she herself has. The Guarini Institute is named for the former New Jersey congressman and U.S. representative to the United Nations who made two separate $10 million donations (in 2013 and 2017) to support Dartmouth’s highest-in-the-Ivy-League 55 percent participation rate in study-abroad programs.
(In addition, as part of its $3 billion Call to Lead capital campaign, Dartmouth announced in April that it had renamed its entire graduate school the Frank J. Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies thanks to a “historic gift” from Guarini.)
In late 2016, Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon and other administrators announced they were melding all of the college’s well-intended fragmented efforts under a centralized and pervasive “Action Plan for Inclusive Excellence,” to, in part, increase recruitment and retention of staff from diverse backgrounds. In early 2017, the college set an ambitious timeline for hiring more underrepresented minorities into the workforce, from 8 percent to 12 percent by 2020.
To attain that goal, senior staff now undergo implicit bias training, staff diversity groups like the International Employee Network have received beefed up budgets, and diversity advocates now weigh in on all senior hires. Data provided by Dartmouth show that the number of international (non-resident) employees working at the college is small, but has remained fairly steady over the past five years, with 112 members in a workforce of roughly 3,300 (the total number of minority workers was 289, or 8.8 percent, in 2017).
Gopal said that one way Dartmouth could boost those numbers is to tailor more of its position descriptions to international workers. Over the course of the past year, she said, she’s applied for six other positions within the college, but she was screened out for all of them because of her need for a work visa that college officials did not support.
“For someone in my situation, I essentially don’t stand a chance,” she said. Gopal said that, while trying to work through the problem, administrators told her that there were others who have been caught in similar situations.
Gopal said she doesn’t want to leave the country, even temporarily, because she fears she won’t be granted re-entry under the current national political climate, which has been increasingly focused on immigration since Trump’s election.
She said she continues to work to find another job at Dartmouth that would justify a sponsorship, but, with time running out, she’ll likely exit the workforce and go back to being a student.
“It’s time for me to have a job,” she said. “That’s what I’m working for.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.