Doctors are warning that the Trump administration’s move to force companies to pay $100,000 for employees on H-1B visas may very well cripple the country’s medical apparatus and make it even harder for Americans to get lifesaving care in a timely manner.
“Raising the H-1B visa fee to $100,000 risks shutting off the pipeline of highly trained physicians, especially in rural and underserved communities,” the American Medical Association said in a statement Monday.
“The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to bring temporary workers into the United States to perform additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” the administration said in a statement announcing the new visa restriction on Friday. “The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security.”
International medical students and residents make up a huge portion of health care employment. Making their companies pay $100,000 in order to employ them would simply wipe many of them out, and rob their patients in the process.
“When you’re putting a doctor in the middle of rural Ohio or rural Indiana, and they have to serve the underserved—that kind of a price tag is going to wipe out a lot of health care for a lot of people across the country who really need it,” attorney David Leopold, who represents H-1B visa doctors serving in health care deserts, told Bloomberg. “If that visa’s not available, then we’re not able to place physicians in these areas.”
Scientist and former H-1B visa holder M.E. Siddall warned that this kind of tax on foreign professionals will lead to a reverse brain drain, as the world’s medical talent may look elsewhere for work.
“The history of the United States is attracting the best minds of the world,” he said. “Princeton would have to pay $100,000 for Einstein?”
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