Many policies, regardless of intention, come with unintended consequences.
One proposed policy that could come with unintended consequences is President Donald Trump proposing a crackdown on immigration.
And the unintended consequences would be on the long-term care workforce.
Here’s how…
With baby boomers growing older, the need for long-term care is only going to grow in the coming years. Someone is going to need to take care of the baby boomer generation.
At the same time, a large portion of the long-term care workforce is those who are foreign-born. One estimate says that about 27 percent of those who work in this workforce are foreign-born, and that many more likely “operate in a ‘gray market’ where they are paid directly by families to care for people in their homes using private funds.” And, the percentage of those in this workforce who are foreign-born is growing. For example, the number of native-born certified nursing assistants (CNAs) has declined rapidly while the number of foreign-born ones has remained constant, thus leading to a higher proportion of CNAs who are foreign-born. This prevented shortages in long-term care facilities from being worse than they already were in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Given these facts, we should be increasing pathways to immigrants to come in, not decrease them. And yet, tightening up immigration policies is exactly what the Trump administration wants to do. For all the talk of immigrants taking “our” jobs, it’s immigrants who in this industry fill the jobs “we” have that “we” are not filling. And if that is the case, we need to encourage pathways to legal immigration in general, including and especially for those who work in long-term care.
And this is not some revolutionary idea, either. North of the border, Canada has made efforts to support internationally educated nurses joining the Canadian workforce. Why? Because they see a need, and they see immigrants as part of addressing that need.
We hope that, rather than trying to conquer Canada, that the Trump administration learns lessons from them instead. One of them is that immigration can be key to addressing long-term care staffing shortages.
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