Immigrant Health-Care Workers in the United States
2020/06/05 Leave a comment
Another good analysis by MPI. Similar picture in Canada with respect to immigrants and visible minorities:
Immigrants represent disproportionately high shares of U.S. workers in many essential occupations, including in health care—a fact underscored during the coronavirus pandemic as the foreign born have played a significant role in frontline pandemic-response sectors. In 2018, more than 2.6 million immigrants, including 314,000 refugees, were employed as health-care workers, with 1.5 million of them working as doctors, registered nurses, and pharmacists. Immigrants are overrepresented among certain health-care occupations. Even as immigrants represent 17 percent of the overall U.S. civilian workforce, they are 28 percent of physicians and 24 percent of dentists, for example, as well as 38 percent of home health aides.
Overall, immigrants ranging from naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, and temporary workers to recipients of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program accounted for nearly 18 percent of the 14.7 million people in the United States working in a health-care occupation in 2018. As a group, immigrant health-care workers are more likely than their U.S.-born counterparts to have obtained a university-level education. Immigrant women in the industry were more likely than natives to work in direct health-care support, the occupations known for low wages. In contrast, immigrant men were more likely than the U.S. born to be physicians and surgeons, occupations that are well compensated. Compared to all foreign-born workers, those employed in the health-care field were more likely to speak English fluently and had higher rates of naturalization and health insurance coverage.
As the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) has documented, significant numbers of immigrant college graduates with health-related degrees are facing skill underutilization, in other words are working in low-skilled jobs (for example registered nurses working as health aides) or are out of work. This skill underutilization, often referred to as brain waste, affects 263,000 immigrants in the United States with college degrees—a workforce whose talents could be tapped amid the pandemic.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of health-care occupations were among the fastest-growing occupations, as projected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for the 2018-28 period. The more immediate trends now are less clear. Like other parts of the U.S. economy, the health-care sector has suffered job losses since February 2020, which may continue until the economy rebalances. Nonetheless, the main drivers for a greater demand for health-care services—population aging and longevity—remain valid. As in the past, immigrants can be expected to play a significant role in the future of U.S. health care.
This Spotlight provides a demographic and socioeconomic profile of foreign-born health-care workers residing in the United States. The data come primarily from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2018 American Community Survey (ACS) and BLS. All data refer to civilian, employed workers ages 16 and older, unless otherwise noted.
About Andrew
