Credit: Sarah Frostenson
Over the past few days, our inboxes have been flooded with letters from doctors and medical researchers whose lives have been shaken up by President Donald Trump’s executive order, which, among other things, restricts immigrants and visa holders from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US.
We’ve heard from foreign-born health care workers who are trapped inside the United States, and from those who can’t enter, despite having jobs, research positions, and US visas or green cards. It’s gut-wrenching.
But the chaos unleashed by the executive order also reveals a little-appreciated fact about our health care system: We’re heavily reliant on foreigners. They’re our doctors, nurses, and home care aides, and they often work in the remote places where American-born doctors don’t want to go.
In many ways, the health system is already stretched too thin, with scarcely enough people spread evenly across the country to do many difficult jobs. And a letter from the American Medical Association to the Secretary of Homeland Security today spelled out how […]
I had a chuckle this morning reading that 30% of doctors & surgeons are immigrants in the US. Years ago, when my sister an RN from Ontario went to Saudi Arabia as a headhunter, she told stories of all the docs and nurses pulled from their homelands to come to ON to reap high rewards. Those countries use ordinary folks tax $$, to build the infrastructure, that builds the universities, that trains these peeps. Then some person comes along and says you can get paid more by moving. That’s legalized theft. Yeah, yeah, i know, it’s nothing personal, it’s just business. Still sucks by any other name and no, it don’t smell like a rose!
Everyone knows that native-born Americans are too stupid to do anything, so we have to import intelligence.