As COVID-19 takes its toll on medical professionals who are putting their health at risk to help those infected and hospitalized with the virus, there is growing awareness of the importance of immigrants to U.S. health care delivery.
About 27,000 immigrants with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status work in health care as doctors, paramedics, nurses, EMTs, medical students etc. Their fates are swinging in the balance as they wait for a decision from the Supreme Court by June regarding the legality of the administration’s rescission of the DACA program. Should the Supreme Court uphold the rationale for the rescission, these health care workers will lose their authorization to work and become deportable at a moment when their services have never been more critically needed, as this op-ed explains. Their importance is so significant that the Supreme Court has been asked to take this impact into consideration as it weighs all the factors in the case.
Additionally, as we’ve noted previously, a significant number of doctors in the U.S. are foreign born. Our immigration laws raise barriers to deploying them to help address the COVID-19 crisis when and where their expertise is greatly needed. There is increasing awareness of this problem, as explained in this Vox article and this NPR report.
Many other countries including Canada have streamlined the process for foreign doctors trained in their countries or trained abroad to gain residency and to practice medicine. The U.S. and Maine already had a growing physician shortage prior to the emergence of COVID-19. However, the pandemic is laying bare how U.S. immigration laws create obstacles for foreign doctors and work against our nation’s public health interests.
Congress should address these deficiencies in any future COVID-19 relief bill so that DACA health professionals and foreign doctors can do what they do best – work to keep all U.S. residents healthy.