Washington, DC — Throughout the year, we have been stating how this administration’s anti-immigrant agenda wasn’t just harmful to immigrants but to all Americans.
New reporting in the Washington Post, CBS News and NPR capture how rural Americans, who are heavily reliant on foreign-born doctors for their healthcare, are among those who will pay the price for the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant crackdown and efforts to restrict legal immigration channels.
As the Post article notes, “After President Donald Trump signed the executive order restricting H-1B visas in September, soaring costs are roiling rural health care facilities that have long struggled to find staff. The fee increase for visa applicants, coupled with broader crackdowns on legal pathways for foreign-born workers, threatens a growing industry and jeopardizes patients who need timely care, according to labor experts and immigration lawyers.”
According to Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
“Rural Americans are among the most underserved populations when it comes to healthcare and immigrant doctors and foreign-born healthcare workers have been essential to filling the void. Yet for rural Americans, their healthcare security isn’t just imperiled by the coming premium spikes in healthcare coverage, but also by the larger anti-immigrant crusade under this administration. While immigrant communities across America are living in fear, the impacts on rural doctors is just another damaging indicator of the growing harm the anti-immigrant crusade is having all across America.”
See key excerpts from recent reporting on how rural America’s healthcare system is being affected by Trump’s anti-immigration policies:
- The Washington Post, “”Rural America relies on foreign doctors. Trump’s visa fee shuts them out,” notes, “After President Donald Trump signed the executive order restricting H-1B visas in September, soaring costs are roiling rural health care facilities that have long struggled to find staff. The fee increase for visa applicants, coupled with broader crackdowns on legal pathways for foreign-born workers, threatens a growing industry and jeopardizes patients who need timely care, according to labor experts and immigration lawyers.”
- CBS News, “Trump administration’s new $100,000 H1-B visa fees could leave rural health care as collateral damage,” notes, “The U.S. health care system depends on foreign-born professionals to fill its ranks of doctors, nurses, technicians, and other health providers, particularly in chronically understaffed facilities in rural America. But a new presidential proclamation aimed at the tech industry’s use of H-1B visas is making it harder for West River and other rural providers to hire those staffers.”
- NPR, “’Nobody wants to come’: What if the U.S. can no longer attract immigrant physicians?,” notes, “Immigrants make up about a quarter of all the country’s doctors, and the U.S. health care system depends heavily on them. There are roughly 325,000 physicians — not including nurses or other critical health care workers — living and working in the U.S., who were born and trained elsewhere. In rural communities, and in some subspecialties of medicine, the reliance on immigrant physicians runs much higher. In primary care and specialties like oncology, for example, foreign-born doctors account for about half of the workforce.”
