As we prepared to honor working people on this Labor Day, I could not think of a more relevant topic to discuss on this week’s podcast that the impact that President Trump's war against immigrants is having on the nation’s health care workforce.
Healthcare is heavily dependent on immigrant workers. Nearly 30% of our physicians hail from abroad. Around 17% of nurses are foreign born. More than one quarter of direct care workers — those who labor as nursing and other aides in hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities and home care — are immigrants.
There are undocumented immigrant workers in each of these categories, especially direct care. Leading Age, the trade association for the long-term care industry, says immigrants make up 30% of home care aides, 20% of nursing assistants, 20% of registered nurses, and 15% of licensed practical nurses in our nursing homes.
No one knows exactly how many of these workers are in the U.S. without legal documentation. But there are 9 million undocumented workers in the United States. A substantial share are engaged in providing health care. Many of them have been here for years, just like the nine Filipino nurses who were deported from my home city of Chicago in the early days of Trump's second term as president.
There are currently about 65 million senior citizens in the U.S. That number is expected to grow to 72 million by 2030. Who will care for those needing special care if Trump and his henchman Stephen Miller succeed in their mass deportation plans?
To discuss this issue, I invited onto this special Labor Day GoozNews podcast a leading researcher in the field — Dr. Patricia Santos of Emory University. Dr. Santos' research focuses on understanding the structural barriers to care in under-served populations and communities. She recently co-authored a commentary in the New England Journal of Medicine on the dangers posed by the immigration crackdown.
She offers an important perspective on what the Trump regime’s inhumane policies on immigration might mean for patients, the institutions that care for them, and the immigrants themselves in the weeks and months ahead.
