On WorldPress.org, Teri Schure reports on an impending problem in the United States’ rural areas – a lack of medical personnel, brought on by GOP xenophobia:
Thousands of J-1 visa applicants come to the United States to attend medical school, but many of those students will now be turned away, according to the American Association of Medical Colleges (AAMC).
In the past, once these students completed their medical residency, as physicians they could either return to their home country for two years before being eligible to re-enter the U.S. through a different immigration pathway, such as an H-1B worker visa, or they could apply for a Conrad 30 J-1 Visa Waiver. This would allow them to extend their stay in the U.S. as long as they would commit to serving in rural and underserved areas for three years.
In the last 15 years, the Conrad 30 J-1 Waiver has funneled 15,000 foreign physicians into underserved communities, according to the AAMC.
Thousands of foreign doctors in a variety of specialties have in the past flocked to clinics and hospitals in the Mississippi Delta region, Appalachia, the Great Plains, and many other places shunned by American physicians for their own personal and/or professional reasons.
While the press was obsessing over Trumpisms, the government quietly passed a bill to dramatically slow down the premium processing for an H-1B visa. Foreign physicians who are desperately needed in places like Montana where nine counties do not have a single doctor will be sidelined indefinitely, unable to provide badly needed medical treatment to hundreds of thousands of rural Americans.
While jobless physicians outside of the U.S. wait to see what our government will decide to do about H-1B visas, facilities in places like Alabama, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Ohio, Kansas, North Dakota, and Montana, will remain in desperate need of doctors.
So, we’re a wonderful country – but we won’t even let valuable folks in, much less desperate immigrants. Unfortunately, a worker is not a worker is not a worker – that is, we’re all different sizes of screw, and most of us can’t fill other holes. So cutting down on immigration isn’t going to necessarily help with the more desperate workers, and will have a double impact of eliminating workers who do qualify for valuable positions – such as doctor. Teri’s article claims nearly 28% of our medical doctors are immigrants.
