A report set for release today seeks to reshape the national immigration debate and notes that for the first time, immigrants with college degrees outnumber those who haven’t finished high school.

“There’s more high-skilled (immigrants) than people believe,” said Audrey Singer, senior fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the report, which contends that the economic contribution of immigrants has been overshadowed by the rancorous debate over illegal immigration.

Singer and Matthew Hall, a sociologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago, analyzed census data for the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas and found that 30 percent of working-age immigrants had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 28 percent who lack a high school diploma.

They are talking, in part, about people such as Dr. Lara Shekerdemian, a native of England who worked in Australia before being recruited last year to run the pediatric critical care departments at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital.

Shekerdemian said she was drawn by the job offer, along with the fact that her partner, Dr. Daniel Penny, was approached at the same time to run the pediatric cardiology departments at the school and hospital.

“The time was right,” she said. “We were looking for new challenges, in a new environment.”

But despite the national statistics, Shekerdemian and Penny aren’t typical of the international arrivals in Houston and most other cities in the Southwest. The number of well-educated foreign-born workers here is growing, but it’s still far below the number of lower-skilled immigrants.

Singer said the highest concentrations of well-educated immigrants live on the east and west coasts and in older industrial cities, including Buffalo, N.Y., and Pittsburgh.

Call for global workforce

Still, Greater Houston has more than 235,000 foreign-born workers with at least a bachelor’s degree, drawn in part by the Texas Medical Center, the oil and gas industry and the region’s universities.

“To be big in oil and gas, you need to go where the opportunities are,” said Ola Morten Aanestad, vice president of media relations for Statoil North America.

Aanestad, who came to Houston a year ago from his native Norway, where Statoil is based, said the energy industry requires a global workforce.

The Brookings study included both legal and illegal immigrants and includes all foreign-born workers, including permanent U.S. residents as well as naturalized citizens.

It argues that immigrants — even those without much formal education – are important to the nation’s workforce, and calls for more investment in teaching them English and helping transfer their skills to good jobs here.

Still disparities

Researchers determined that foreign-born workers at all educational levels earn less than native-born workers who are similarly educated.

Low-skilled immigrants, however, are more likely to be employed, and less likely to live in poverty, than low-skilled native-born workers, the study found.

“Most immigrants in this country are here to stay,” Singer said.

But an advocate for immigration reform drew a distinction between assistance for legal and illegal immigrants, and said he wouldn’t support any effort that did not end illegal immigration.

Curtis Collier, president of U.S. Border Watch, described the current system as unfair, saying it offers visas to workers with in-demand skills and people with $100,000 or more to invest, while turning away the low-skilled and poor.

“We ought to rework the entire immigration system,” Collier said.

Singer said three factors have led to higher education levels among immigrants:

An increase in international students.

Growth in H-1B and other visas or permanent-residency programs for skilled workers.

An economic shift to jobs requiring more education.

Adria Baker, executive director of the Office of International Students and Scholars at Rice University, said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks temporarily made it more difficult to obtain visas for international researchers and faculty, although that situation has eased.

Rice had about 600 foreign-born faculty members, researchers and shorter-term scholars during the 2009-10 school year, up 58 percent over the previous five years.

Even for those with sought-after skills, immigrating to the United States isn’t easy.

Shekerdemian and Penny were granted permanent resident status as “aliens of extraordinary ability.” Even so, she said, it took seven months to be granted entrance after they were hired.

It has been a good move, she said. “But I would only recommend this to people that are sure it’s where they want to be.”

Economic effects

High-skilled workers are admitted because of their skills, but economist Barton Smith, the recently retired director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston, said immigrants at both ends of the educational spectrum can adversely affect the U.S. economy.

Smith disputed the argument that low-skilled immigrants take jobs Americans don’t want.

“It’s a matter of the wage we’re willing to pay,” he said. “If we don’t make these jobs available, it means a lot of Americans who don’t have high skills will have an increasingly difficult time getting a job.”

Educated immigrants, meanwhile, fill the growing demand for skilled workers, lessening pressure to improve education levels at home.

“We’ve got so many Americans that are under-educated, and I think we need to concentrate our efforts on educating them,” Smith said. “We’re seeing the gap widen between haves and have-nots in America, and a good part of that is education.”