Oh the Healthcare system will collapse. We have not fostered enough of a homegrown workforce to survive this. We don’t have doctors for a reason I struggle to understand perfectly but that has something to do with a quota our cap the ama set years ago that they’ve refused to raise. But a lot of those roles get filled by foreign educated physicians.

The part I know better is that we don’t have enough nurses working bedside (which is where we need them most, not as NPs or reviewing charts or even really in clinics) because we’re forcing them through watching and often even creating incredible human suffering (ever seen CPR on a 90y/o?) while being exposed to violence from patients, families, and often even their own coworkers and bosses. No one in their right mind would do that at all let alone do it AND struggle to feed a family, and hospital CEOs do not buy their third yacht by paying nurses enough to fully support themselves and thrive on. And they certainly aren’t paying enough to support ONE person to the nursing assistants who they and the patients completely rely on for daily feeding and not wearimg literal holes in their buttcheeks.

So they’re bringing in nurses from the Philippines, Caribbean, Nigeria, and other places to work for cheap, but they’re also lying to them about the jobs and often how dangerous they are, especially in psychiatry and fields that deal with a lot of it like the ER and the amount of dementia seen in medsurg and nursing homes. And then they’ve signed this contract that says they owe back all the money it took to bring them over plus some if they quit. It’s hard to express it precisely without sounding racist but a lot of them actually even qualify as having been human trafficked. The fact that their abuse happens to exist as a mechanism to suppress my wages is just icing on the shit cake.

And the immigrant nurses who did find good positions and are making it work aren’t doing it for us or to support our country (which makes sense and again, I don’t hold it against them). Most of them tell me they’re sending most of the money home where it will go farther or setting up their retirements outside of the country. I’m not saying this in any way that is blaming the other poor people around the world who are just trying to make their own lives work. And tbh they’re some of my best coworkers. This is on the people actually steering this shit who intentionally decayed our own workforce for their own benefit.

The problem is that our economy right now is fundamentally structured in a very precarious and unsustainable way on cheap immigrant labor. We’ve avoided training our own people to take up critical positions in health and human safety, education, agriculture, manufacturing, etc. We’ve forced out the ones who were homegrown because they expected higher pay or, often in the case of nurses, they also demanded better for their patients and their bosses DO NOT want to pay for higher nurse to patient ratios even though it’s proven to make the biggest difference in patient outcomes. An immigrant nurse who’s been human trafficked is not going to pipe up about that.

And some of those critical jobs are going to be filled by prison labor (which is its own discussion of exploitation) but you can’t do that with the health and human safety jobs without admitting that the inmates haven’t actually hurt anyone. Except you kind of can by making female prisoners in California be smokejumpers jumping literally into California wildfires then just refuse them jobs in firefighting on release.

We’ve let them rot this country out from the inside and immigrants are all that’s still propping us up, in multiple ways in multiple industries. Now they wanna kick that out from under us too.