Immigrants and Health Care

July 11, 2025

Who Will Care for America? Immigration Policy and the Coming Health Workforce Crisis
The New England Journal of Medicine
July 5, 2025
By Patricia Mae G. Santos, et al

As the federal government seeks to curb immigration of all forms, immigrant health care workers and their patients will inevitably find themselves caught in the dragnet, which will have serious consequences for the system at large. The United States already has been grappling with severe health care worker shortages, which are projected to worsen over the next few years. For aging populations the forecast is especially dire.

The physically demanding nature of direct care work (home health aides, personal care aides, and certified nursing assistants), combined with low pay and high susceptibility to exploitation, makes these roles unattractive to U.S.-born and highly skilled foreign-born workers. Indiscriminate mass-deportation policies not only infringe on basic civil liberties but may also exacerbate existing worker shortages.

Immigration policy must therefore protect the dignity of people who dedicate their lives to caring for others, The recent deportation of immigrant health care workers is our canary in the coal mine: policymakers must act swiftly, or risk endangering the health of us all.

What a $178 billion gift means for the immigration police state
The Washington Post
July 8, 2025
By Catherine Rampell

Trump’s new mega-law invests $178 billion in additional immigration enforcement over the next decade. To be clear, this is not merely about “border security.” It’s largely for more detention centers and boots on the ground within the U.S. interior. This means spending more dollars to round up gardeners, home health aides, grad students, nannies, construction workers, etc.

In other words, the administration is going after your family, neighbors and friends, regardless of how long they’ve been here, whether they present any “safety” threat or how much they’ve contributed to their communities.

With daily arrest quotas to meet, agents are filling detention centers not with criminals and gangbangers, but people with no criminal history whatsoever.

Trump is not merely siccing immigration forces upon those who had been undocumented (with or without criminal records), under the stewardship of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, this administration has also been working to “de-document” hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are here legally.

The Justice Department recently announced plans to prioritize revoking citizenship from naturalized U.S. citizens. The administration is also still trying to strip birthright citizenship from babies born in the United States, including those born to both undocumented and many authorized immigrant parents.

 

Comment by Don McCanne

Stephen Miller has been working with President Trump to advance immigration policies that are opposed by most of the American public. Perhaps foremost amongst these is his effort to dramatically reduce legitimate immigration into the United States, much of which is beneficial because most of these individuals improve our national productivity, not only in menial occupations but often in professional roles as well. Yet Miller distorts his pronouncements to provide a rhetorical basis for obstructing US residence of these qualified individuals.

Listening to his framing induces a “thought experiment” that places him as the object of similarly distorted thought processes:

“To repair a problem you must first define it. Stephen Miller defines immigration as a broad negative. This implies the need to expel foreigners whom he considers to be undesirable, even if they are upstanding, contributing to our health and economy. A prominent medical journal offers a more positive and honest view of immigration as implied in the title, “Who Will Care for America? Immigration Policy and the Coming Health Workforce Crisis.”

“The growing dislike of Miller for his disruption of the valuable contributions made by immigrants to US prosperity creates a new proposition: How can we neutralize Miller’s harmful actions? Removing him from his current White House role seems the logical path. Some say his own immigrant origins should be investigated, to scrutinize the legitimacy of his claim to be in the US. That seems fair. However, we reject drastic measures, as suggested by some, because we value humanity, which we’re unsure Stephen Miller does.”

The ”oust Stephen Miller” path should have far greater appeal to the public than the despicable ideas and actions he is foisting off on us. In removing him, our society would achieve a trifecta: more humane, healthier, and wealthier.